If your asbestos siding is largely in excellent condition and you decide to keep it, you may only a few pieces that are chipped or broken to replace.
If you’re looking to replace a few of the asbestos shingles on your home, various manufacturers today make a fiber cement replacement product that looks exactly like older asbestos shingles.
These shingles mimic the style and profile of older siding but contain no potentially harmful asbestos. This lets homeowners replace pieces of older siding without removing everything.
GAF WeatherSide and James Hardie Replacement Asbestos Siding
These fiber cement replacement shingles can also be safely cut, drilled, and sawn to your heart’s content, if you need to cut a hole for an exhaust or vent pipe, etc.
GAF provides its WeatherSide line of absestos replacement siding, which comes in various sizes and profiles, and James Hardie has its own line of popular fiber cement shingle siding as well.
Another possibility is to check underneath your house, as sometimes extra original siding shingles were stored underneath homes as it was being installed, so sometimes original shingles can be found there.
Care must be taken when installing them, obviously, and they should never be cut or sawn, but if you’re lucky the solution to your problem might be underneath your own home.
I have asbestos siding on my house which is in good condition, with the exception of some shingles on the front side of the house where rain damage is peeling the paint off. I need to clean the shingles in order to repaint. How do I safely clean the shingles?
Audrey,
If you’re able to manage it, gently washing the shingles with a power washer will work. If you find it too hard to control the water spray and that it’s blasting the shingles hard enough to dislodge them, then you’ll need to resort to hand-washing them and good old-fashioned elbow grease.
Don’t ever use a paint scraper to try to remove peeling paint. Get as much off as you can by hand-scrubbing it. Asbestos is only dangerous when fibers are released, and doing that takes serious action such as cutting and sawing the siding. Scrubbing it puts you in no danger whatsoever.