Office moves rarely fail on the furniture. They fail on Monday morning, when half the desks have no network and the phones do not answer, and everyone discovers the problem was a timing gap between two suppliers who never spoke to each other.
The physical work of moving an office is well understood. The part that decides whether you open on Monday is the boundary between the moving crew and whoever looks after your IT — where it sits, who crosses it, and at what hour on which day. Get that written down and the rest follows.
What the moving crew handles
The crew handles the physical relocation of equipment that has already been made ready to move:
- Workstations — monitors, docking stations, peripherals, boxed and labelled after IT has disconnected them.
- Furniture — desks, chairs, meeting tables, pedestals, filing cabinets, storage.
- Network hardware in transit — routers, switches, firewalls and patch panels, powered down and packed.
- Printers — standard floor printers as part of the general move.
- Handsets, once the cutover plan for them is confirmed.
- Server components, packed for transit after IT has removed them from the rack.
In short: once a thing is powered down, disconnected, labelled and in a container, it is the crew's. Before that, it is not.
What the crew does not touch
This list should be as explicit in your plan as the one above:
- Disconnecting live network cabling.
- Powering down servers, or anything that requires a graceful shutdown.
- Removing hardware from a rack, or installing it in one.
- Configuring switches, firewalls, access points or anything else on the network.
- Anything that requires a vendor-certified technician to remain under warranty or support.
A crew that offers to pull cables to keep things moving is not helping. The Monday-morning cost of unlabelled cabling is far higher than an hour of waiting on the Friday.
What your IT lead handles
Whether that is an in-house team or an external provider, the work is the same shape:
Before the move — disconnect workstations, label every cable bundle at both ends, photograph the back of anything complicated, power down servers properly, and confirm what happens to connectivity, phones and any on-premises services during the gap.
During the move — be reachable, and where possible be on site as rooms are placed, so reconnection follows the crew rather than waiting for it.
After the move — reconnect, test the network, test printing, test the phones, and walk each user through their desk before anyone tries to work at it.
The handoff window, and the three ways it breaks
The single most expensive mistake in an office move is a badly defined handoff. It fails in three recognisable ways.
IT arrives after the crew has started. The crew cannot touch connected equipment, so they work around it, come back to it, and the day stretches. In the worst version somebody improvises, cables come out unlabelled, and the cost lands on Monday.
IT finishes long after the crew arrives. The crew waits. That is not a technical problem, it is simply expensive, and it is entirely avoidable with one phone call the week before.
Reconnection slips by a day. IT commits to Sunday, delivers Monday afternoon, and the business walks into a building it cannot work in. Of the three, this is the one that actually costs money.
The fix in every case is the same and it is not complicated: a short meeting before the move between you, the crew lead and the IT lead, producing one agreed timeline with names and mobile numbers against each step.
A weekend sequence that works
A typical small-office relocation, with the work split across a weekend so nobody loses a working day:
- Before the weekend — a planning call between you, the crew lead and the IT lead. One timeline, agreed. Certificates of insurance filed with both buildings, and lift bookings confirmed at both ends.
- Friday afternoon — IT disconnects, labels and powers down. Staff clear their own desks into labelled crates; personal items go home with their owners rather than onto the truck.
- Friday evening — the crew arrives after IT has finished, packs and loads.
- Saturday — transit and unload. Furniture is placed to the floor plan, not stacked in a corridor to be sorted later.
- Sunday — workstations placed desk by desk, with IT reconnecting behind the crew as each area is finished.
- Sunday afternoon — a joint walkthrough with you, the crew lead and IT. Anything missing or wrong is flagged while both parties are still in the building.
- Monday morning — the office works.
The detail that makes it work is step five. Placement and reconnection running in parallel, rather than in sequence, is what buys back the day.
Printers, copiers and the awkward category
Some equipment does not fit either list cleanly and needs its own decision early:
- Production copiers and multi-tray machines are heavy, sensitive to handling and frequently under a service agreement that specifies who may move them. Check the agreement before you plan anything, then scope it as specialist handling.
- Server racks move as a frame and as components separately. Whether the rack itself travels is a decision, not a default.
- UPS units and batteries need to be identified early. Batteries have transport restrictions and cannot be treated as ordinary hardware.
- Anything wall-mounted — screens, access control, signage — needs someone nominated to remove it and someone nominated to refit it. That is often neither the crew nor IT.
Old equipment and data
If the move is also the moment you retire old hardware, keep that entirely separate from the relocation.
Equipment leaving service should go to a certified electronics recycler, and anything holding data should be handled by whoever is accountable for that data with a record of what was destroyed and when. This is not something to hand to a moving crew as a favour on the day, and no reputable crew will accept it.
Decide the list of what is being retired before the move. Equipment that is not going does not need to be packed, loaded, unloaded or placed.
Plan it as one project
The recurring theme is that an office move is a single project with two suppliers, and it goes wrong when it is run as two projects that happen to share a weekend.
Name one person who owns the timeline. Give both suppliers each other's numbers. Agree the handoff hours in writing. Everything else is logistics.
Send us the floor plans for both ends, the access and lift arrangements at each, and your IT lead's availability window, and we will build the sequence around it — in writing, before the date is held. Start your move brief, or call 778-994-2303. Our commercial moving page covers the wider scope.