Concrete garage refurbishment: worth it, or start again?

Whether a concrete garage is worth refurbishing comes down to one question: how much of it are you actually keeping? Replace a door and a couple of panels and you have a sensible repair. Replace the roof, the door, the windows and half the panels and you have spent most of the cost of a new building to own a forty-year-old one.

Nucrete does not carry out refurbishment work and has no plans to. We manufacture and install new buildings, remove old ones, and lay concrete bases. We do supply concrete panels on their own, which is a genuine option if you are repairing a garage yourself or through a builder. Beyond that, this page is here because we are asked about refurbishment every week and an honest answer is more use than a sales pitch.

Two things change the answer completely.

The first is the base. If the slab has cracked, sunk or broken up, nothing standing on it can be put right while it stays there — the panels will never sit true again. A failed base means the building comes off it whatever you decide to do next, and at that point you are already paying for most of a replacement.

The second is age across the whole building rather than in one place. Concrete panels of forty or fifty years old are often crumbling and breaking up at the edges. If that is happening in several bays rather than one, replacing panels turns into replacing the building one piece at a time, at a worse price and with no guarantee at the end of it.

Usually three separate trades, quoting separately and scheduling around each other:

• A local builder or joiner for the structural work, panels and roof carpentry. • A licensed asbestos removal contractor, if the roof is asbestos cement — which it very likely is on anything built before the UK ban in November 1999. • A garage door company for the door.

Get all three quotes before committing to any of them. The first number you hear is rarely the total, and the total is the only figure that lets you compare refurbishment against replacement honestly.

When the work is finished, look at what you can see from the house.

You see the walls and the door. You do not really see the roof, which is the part you have just paid the most for. If the panels are original and tired, the garage will look much as it did before — tidier at the top, unchanged where it counts.

And ask who stands behind it. New work joined to an old structure rarely carries a meaningful guarantee: if damp appears in a corner a year later, the roofer can reasonably say it is coming through the old panels, and the panels have no guarantee at all. Both positions are arguable, so in practice nobody is responsible and you pay twice.

The honest reading of that table is that the right-hand column usually costs a bit more, not less. We are not going to pretend otherwise, because the comparison is more useful when it is straight.

What the difference buys is the part worth thinking about. A refurbishment leaves you with a building whose life is limited by its oldest remaining component, no guarantee covering the whole thing, and three separate contractors who can each point at the others if something goes wrong. A replacement leaves you with a new building, one company answerable for it, and fifty years ahead of it rather than behind.

And occasionally the new building is simply cheaper. That is why both numbers are worth having in front of you before you decide.

In short: whether a concrete garage is worth refurbishing depends on how much of it you are keeping. Replacing a door and one or two panels is a sensible repair, and sectional garages are bolted rather than mortared so an individual damaged panel can usually be taken out without dismantling the building. A full refurbishment — new door, asbestos roof removed, re-trussing and re-sheeting — typically costs £4,500 to £6,500, with windows and a personnel door of the same age often needed on top, and it normally takes three separate trades: a builder or joiner, a licensed asbestos contractor, and a garage door company. Two things settle the argument early. If the concrete base has cracked or sunk, nothing standing on it can be put right while it stays there. And if panels are crumbling across several bays rather than one, repair becomes replacement done piecemeal at a worse price. What you are left with afterwards is a building whose visible parts, the walls and the door, are unchanged, and no meaningful guarantee, because new work joined to old panels leaves responsibility for a later leak genuinely arguable. Nucrete does not carry out refurbishment; it supplies concrete panels on their own, removes old buildings including licensed asbestos removal from around £1,100, lays concrete bases, and installs new buildings with a 10-year structural guarantee.