Office clearance in Ballsbridge

Period offices: four floors and one staircase

A lot of Ballsbridge business happens in houses built as homes: tall red-brick and Victorian terraces along the main roads, and Georgian-style houses on the streets towards the canal. Professional firms, consultancies, embassies and representative bodies have filled them for decades. They make handsome offices and awkward clearances.

The reason is simple. A typical building has three or four floors, a basement or garden level, one staircase and no lift. Every desk, cabinet and box comes down that staircase by hand. It's the same work you'd do in any office, just slower, with more people and much more care. This page covers that side of it. What we take and how electricals are dealt with is on our main office clearance page.

Treating the building with care

Many of these buildings are protected structures, and even when they aren't, the landlord will notice a gouged banister or a cracked cornice. So the handling comes first:

• Route walked first. We look at every turn, door frame and landing before the first piece moves.
• Covers and padding. Floor covers on the hall and stair carpet, padding on newel posts and the tightest corners.
• Taken apart in the room. Desks, bookcases and cupboards dismantled where they stand, so nothing gets turned on a landing.
• Carried, never dragged. Enough people on each heavy piece, and sack trucks only where the stairs allow.
• Fixtures left alone. Fireplaces, shutters, built-in presses and anything fixed to the walls stay where they are.

If a lot of fit-out work has gone in over the years, such as partitions or cabling, removing it is for a fit-out contractor, not a clearance crew.

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Basements, garden levels and the front steps

The basement is where the problem usually starts. In many Ballsbridge buildings it's the archive: decades of files, old furniture and broken equipment, reached by the area steps under the granite front steps, or through a garden door at the back. The steps are narrow and often damp, so we bring crates rather than relying on old cardboard boxes, and take everything up in small loads.

At the top, the front steps are the last obstacle before the van. They're granite and they're steep, so heavy pieces go down them with two people and a sack truck, not bounced. Where a building has a rear lane or mews access, we'll use it, since it's often flatter and closer to where the van can stop.

Embassies, firms and their security

Ballsbridge has a high number of embassies, missions and firms with their own security arrangements. If yours is one of them, tell us what's required and we'll fit around it: names and ID in advance, set arrival times, an escort while we're in the building, or areas we're not to enter. Clearing around those rules is mainly a matter of knowing them before the day. Building managers in the larger Dublin 4 offices tend to want the same details in advance: insurance, our permit number, the crew's names and the van registration. We can send them directly.

The same goes for what stays behind. Security equipment, safes and anything belonging to the landlord should be clearly marked, and we'll only remove what you've confirmed is going.

Law libraries, deed rooms and old files

Professional offices in Dublin 4 tend to accumulate paper, from bound law reports and old textbooks to deed boxes and decades of closed files. Sort it in this order before we arrive:

1. What must be kept. Check retention rules with your accountant, solicitor or professional body.
2. What's confidential. Client, staff and financial records go to a shredding company. We don't shred.
3. What's left. Books, catalogues, empty files and general paper we take; books in good condition are set aside for reuse where possible.

Data on old computers works the same way. Under GDPR it's the firm's responsibility, so wipe or remove drives before the clearance. The rest of the equipment goes to electrical recycling.

What a period-building clearance costs

Ballsbridge clearances are priced on volume, the number of floors, the basement and the carry to the van, because those drive the time on site. A building of three or four floors with a full basement can take a full day or more, since every load goes up or down by hand, and we'll give you a realistic time with the quote. You'll get a fixed price from your photos, agreed before booking. Spotless is fully insured on every job and holds waste collection permit NWCPO-25-13287-01.

For modern office blocks nearby, see Grand Canal Dock; for office parks and practices a little further south, Clonskeagh; and for the whole county, our overview of office clearance in Dublin. For homes and apartments, there's our Ballsbridge property clear-out page. Once the rooms are empty, carpets can be done with commercial carpet cleaning, and the granite steps and tiled paths with power washing in Ballsbridge.