Clearing homes on Howth Head
Howth has three distinct kinds of home. Around the harbour and up Abbey Street, Church Street and Main Street are the old village houses and cottages, two-storey and terraced, with the apartment blocks of the last twenty years facing the piers along Harbour Road. Up the Hill, on Thormanby Road to the Summit, Balkill Road, Carrickbrack Road and the lanes off them, are large detached houses on steep plots with long driveways, built across the last century and extended since. And on the lower slopes towards Sutton are the more ordinary semis and bungalows.
Howth Castle and the demesne sit between the village and Sutton, the Baily lighthouse marks the far end of the headland, and the cliff path brings walkers up to the Summit and back every weekend of the year. It is a place people stay in for decades, and a lot of our Howth work is a house being cleared after fifty or sixty years in one family.
Those houses hold a lot: several reception rooms, four or five bedrooms, a study, a utility, a garage and often a basement or a floored attic, with good furniture that deserves better than a transfer station.
What we clear in Howth
- Large detached houses on the Hill being sold after a lifetime, usually two van loads or more. Our house clearance page sets out how we plan a job that size.
- Bereavement clearances, taken room by room with the family and never rushed. See our bereavement clearance page and our guide to clearing a house after a bereavement.
- Good furniture going to new homes: dining suites, bookcases, wardrobes and sideboards that we set aside for reuse rather than dispose of. See furniture removal.
- Attics, garages and basements, which in these houses are large and have often not been emptied since the house was bought.
- Harbour apartments and village cottages between tenants or on a sale, where the job is smaller and parking is the challenge.
What can be reused is reused or donated where we can place it, recyclables are separated, and what is left goes to a licensed waste transfer station under our Waste Collection Permit.
Steep drives, narrow lanes and summer traffic
Access is the whole story in Howth. On the Hill the driveways climb or drop steeply from the road, some with a hairpin, some gravelled, some built for a small car in 1965. We ask for a photo of the entrance with your room photos and decide in advance whether the box van goes in or stays at the gate. Where it stays at the gate, we carry, and that time is built into the quote.
The lanes off Balkill Road and Carrickbrack Road are narrow with stone walls either side, so we take them slowly and avoid the school run. Inside, the houses usually have generous stairs and landings, which makes the heavy pieces easier than in a city terrace, but there may be a flight of outside steps between the drive and the front door.
In the village and at the harbour the problem is parking rather than gradient. Harbour Road and the streets behind it are packed on fine weekends and busy most afternoons, so we book village and harbour jobs for weekday mornings and load quickly.
Why Howth families call us
The families who ring us about a Howth house are usually dealing with a parent’s estate, often from abroad, and need one company to handle the lifting, the sorting and the disposal of a very full house. We can meet a sibling, a neighbour or the estate agent for keys, work from a list of what stays, and send photos as each room is finished.
If the house is going through probate, the question of what can be cleared and when comes up early. There is a clear explainer on clearing a house before probate, and the sensible answer is always to ask the solicitor first.
We are fully insured, carry a current Waste Collection Permit and work Monday to Saturday. From Howth we cover the whole peninsula, including Sutton and Baldoyle, and the coast down through Raheny, with Portmarnock across the water.
