So you’ve been handed the office move.
Maybe you volunteered, maybe you were volunteered. Either way, someone’s just told you the lease is up in Dublin 2 and the new place is signed, and now there’s a spreadsheet with your name on it.
Here’s the good news: an office relocation isn’t hard, it’s just long. There’s no single terrifying task in the whole thing. It’s about forty small ones, and the only real trap is doing them in the wrong order or leaving them too late.
So this is a straight 12-week countdown. Work back from your move date, do the things in each block, and you’ll be grand. If you’ve only got eight weeks, don’t panic — just compress the early stages and move faster on the IT bit, because that’s the one that genuinely can’t be rushed.
Let’s go.
First things first: one person owns this
Before week twelve even starts, pick a move lead. One name.
Office moves go wrong when three people are half-responsible. You end up with two people assuming the other one booked the lift, and nobody at all thinking about the broadband. One person owns the plan, chases the actions and makes the calls. Everyone else has tasks assigned to them.
That person is probably you, since you’re reading this. Sorry.
12 weeks out: the foundations
Read both leases properly. Not skim — read. You’re looking for your notice period on the old place, and more importantly your dilapidations obligations. That’s the clause about what condition you have to hand the space back in. Stripping out partitions, making good the walls, taking up cabling — that stuff takes time and money, and finding out about it in week two is how budgets get blown.
Set a real budget. Removals, crate hire, IT, new furniture, storage, waste disposal, dilapidations work, and a contingency because there’s always something. Put a number on each so you can see where the money actually goes.
Book site surveys at both ends. This is the single most useful thing you can do this early. Someone comes out, walks both buildings, and tells you what’s realistic. They’ll spot things you won’t — a goods lift that’s too small for the desks, a loading bay with a two-hour restriction, a stairwell that means the safe isn’t coming out the way it went in.
We do this as standard for any office relocation job, and honestly the survey is where most of the plan gets written.
Set your move date. Ideally a weekend, and ideally not the last Friday of the month when every mover in Dublin is booked out.
10 weeks out: decide what’s actually moving
You’ve got more stuff than you think and less of it is worth moving than you’d hope.
Walk the floor with the office manager and put everything into four piles:
- Moving. Desks, chairs, monitors, the good meeting table.
- Replacing. Anything that’s on its last legs. Cheaper to bin and buy new than to pay to move it.
- Storing. Furniture you’ll want later, archive boxes, equipment you use twice a year.
- Gone. The three broken printers in the corridor. The chair with the wonky arm. The 2016 marketing pull-up banners.
Be ruthless with that last pile. You pay to move volume, so every item you don’t move is money back.
If the new space is smaller — which it often is these days — the storage pile gets bigger. Office storage in Dublin is usually cheaper per month than the equivalent square metres of city-centre office rent, which is the whole argument for it in one sentence.
8 weeks out: floor plan and the IT audit
Two big jobs this block.
The floor plan
Get a proper layout of the new space and allocate every desk. Not “roughly where sales will sit” — actual named positions with numbers. You’ll use those numbers for labelling later, and it saves an enormous amount of confusion on the day.
Check power and data points against your plan while you’re at it. It’s amazing how often a desk position turns out to have no socket anywhere near it.
The IT and comms audit
Right, this is the one. If you take a single thing from this whole article, take this.
Order your broadband and phone lines now. Not in a month. Now.
Lead times for business lines in Ireland can run to several weeks, and occasionally a lot longer if there’s any kind of install or wayleave involved. The number one cause of an office move going badly wrong isn’t dropped furniture. It’s a company sitting in a beautiful new office on Monday morning with no internet.
While you’re at it, audit what hardware you’ve actually got. Servers, switches, comms cabinets, printers, screens, that ancient machine in the corner that runs one critical thing and nobody knows the password to. Write it all down.
Specialist office IT relocation is its own discipline for a reason — decommissioning and recommissioning a comms room isn’t a two-lads-and-a-trolley job.
6 weeks out: lock in the logistics
Confirm your removals company and agree a written schedule. Not a vague date — an actual running order for the day. Who arrives when, what goes on which vehicle, what gets delivered first at the other end.
Book the lifts. Both buildings. Most multi-tenant buildings require you to book the goods lift, and some insist on protective coverings being fitted. Ask the building manager, in writing, what the rules are.
Sort access and parking. Loading bay times, restricted hours, whether the truck can physically get in. In parts of Dublin city centre this genuinely determines what time your move can start. If you need parking suspensions or permits, apply now — councils don’t do same-day.
Flag anything heavy or awkward. Safes, plant, workshop equipment, server racks, anything on a machine base. Heavy machinery relocation needs different kit and different planning, and it’s not something to mention on the morning.
4 weeks out: people and paper
Tell everyone properly
Staff need more than an all-staff email the week before. Tell them the date, the new address, what they’re responsible for packing, what they’re not to touch, and where they’re sitting. A floor plan on the wall by the kettle works better than any email.
Set expectations about the first day too. There will be a box that’s gone missing and a monitor that won’t wake up. If people expect that, it’s fine. If they expect perfection, it’s a crisis.
Get the crates in
Proper stacking crates beat cardboard for an office move — they’re sturdier, they stack safely on trolleys, and you’re not taping a hundred boxes. Crate hire is usually delivered a week or so before the move and collected after, so you’re not left with a mountain of cardboard.
Set the labelling system now and make it stupidly simple. Desk number and destination room. That’s it. If your system needs explaining twice, it’s too complicated and people won’t use it.
Deal with the paperwork
Every office has the store room nobody opens. Now’s the moment. Split the archive into three:
- Keep and store. Records you’re required to hold on to but never physically touch. These belong in proper document storage, not taking up floor space in a building you’re paying rent on.
- Digitise. Anything you actually refer to. Secure document scanning means you carry a search bar instead of forty boxes.
- Destroy. Anything past retention. Confidential material shouldn’t go in a skip — certified shredding and recycling gives you a destruction certificate, which is the bit your compliance people will ask for.
Worth saying plainly: retention periods and data protection obligations vary by record type and sector, so check with whoever handles compliance or legal for your business before anything gets destroyed. Don’t guess on this one.
2 weeks out: the detail work
Staff pack their own desks. Give them a deadline that’s a day earlier than you need, because it won’t be met. Personal items, drawers, anything on the desk surface.
Confirm the IT sequence. When machines get powered down, who’s backing up what, when the comms room comes offline and when it’s expected back up. Have your IT provider on site or on call for the move itself, not just afterwards.
Update your address everywhere. This one always gets left late and it’s a long list:
- Google Business Profile — do it on move day, not before, or people turn up at an empty office
- Website, footer, contact page, any landing pages
- Email signatures
- Invoice templates and accounting software
- Insurers, bank, CRO filings, Revenue
- Suppliers and couriers
- Headed paper and business cards, if you still use them
- Any directory or listing you’re on
Confirm cleaning and dilapidations contractors for the old space so they can get in straight after you’re out.
Move weekend: the day itself
If you’ve done the previous eleven weeks, this is the easy part. Genuinely.
Have the move lead and one IT person on site at both ends. Not the whole team standing around — that just adds bodies to a space where people are carrying furniture.
Sequence matters at the other end. Comms room and IT first, then desks and screens, then storage and everything else. You want the network live and tested before anyone worries about where the plants go.
Set a realistic “back online” target and tell people what it is. Saying “we’ll be fully up by Tuesday lunchtime” and beating it is far better than promising Monday nine o’clock and missing it.
Why weekends usually work out cheaper
It sounds backwards, because an out-of-hours job costs more on the invoice. But do the sum on the other side.
Take your team’s day rate, multiply it by everyone who can’t work, and add whatever a day of missed calls, missed orders or missed billable hours costs you. For most businesses that number dwarfs the difference on the removals quote. Weekend office moves exist because for a lot of companies the maths is genuinely not close.
Week one after: the tidy-up
Don’t close the project on Monday. Give it a week.
Run a snagging list. Walk the floor, note everything — wobbly desk, monitor arm missing a bolt, meeting room screen not connecting. Fix in one batch rather than one at a time.
Have a missing items process. One person, one list, one email address. Most “missing” things turn up in a crate in the wrong room, but you want them reported centrally rather than twelve people wandering around opening boxes.
Hand back the old premises properly. Keys, fobs, alarm codes, meter readings, final cleaning, dilapidations sign-off. Take dated photos of the empty space before you hand the keys over. It costs you five minutes and it can save you an argument months later.
Do a quick debrief. Twenty minutes with the people involved, write down what you’d do differently. You’ll move again eventually and future you will be grateful.
The short version
If you only remember four things:
- Order the broadband and phone lines the moment you have the address.
- Get a survey done early — it writes most of the plan for you.
- Move less. Store or bin the rest.
- Move at the weekend if you can afford the downtime maths.
Frequently asked questions
How long does an office move in Dublin take to plan?
Twelve weeks is comfortable for a typical Dublin office. You can do it in six or eight if you have to, but the pressure lands almost entirely on IT and comms lead times. Larger relocations, or anything with a fit-out or heavy plant involved, are better planned four to six months out.
Should we move at the weekend or during the week?
Weekend, in most cases. The removals cost is higher but the downtime cost is usually much higher again once you count lost working days across the whole team. Businesses that can genuinely pause for a day or two sometimes go midweek and save on the quote.
What causes most office moves to go wrong?
Broadband and phone lines, by a distance. Furniture arriving late is an inconvenience. Arriving in a new office with no connectivity stops the business. Order lines as early as you possibly can and confirm the install date in writing.
Do we need to move everything at once?
No, and often you shouldn’t. Plenty of companies move the working office in one go and send archive material, spare furniture and seasonal equipment straight into storage. It’s usually cheaper than paying to move things into a space you’ll only have to clear again.
What do we do with old archive files during a move?
Split them into keep, digitise and destroy. Anything you’re required to retain but never touch goes to document storage. Anything you actually use is worth scanning. Anything past retention should be destroyed through a certified service so you get a destruction certificate. Check retention requirements with your compliance or legal contact before anything is disposed of.
Who should be on site on move day?
Your move lead and an IT person at each end, and that’s about it. Any more and you’ve got people standing in the way of a job that’s already being handled. Everyone else is better off at home or working remotely.
How do we get a price for an office relocation?
Through a survey. Office moves have too many variables for a meaningful phone quote — access, lift availability, floor levels, volume, IT complexity, timing. Someone walks both buildings and you get a real figure rather than a rough one.
That’s the plan
Twelve weeks sounds like a lot until you start ticking things off, and then it moves fast. Get the survey done early, get the lines ordered, and keep one list that one person owns. The rest is just working through it.
If you’d like a hand with the planning, or you just want someone to walk the two buildings and tell you what you’re dealing with, give us a ring on (+353) 1 451 3299 or request a quote. We’ve done a fair few office removals in Dublin over the years, and we’re happy to talk it through even if you’re only at the “we might be moving” stage.
Good luck with it. It’ll be grand.
