A small office move looks like a downsized commercial project on paper. In practice it behaves like a four-bedroom house move with a much stricter clock, because the measure of success is not that everything arrived — it is that everyone can work on Monday morning.
That difference drives almost every decision in the plan.
What makes an office move its own thing
The clock is the point. Most small office moves are timed so the team walks back into a functioning office at the start of the week: load after hours on the Friday, transport and unload Saturday, place and finish Sunday. Every other decision bends around that window.
The buildings are stricter. Office towers run tighter rules than residential strata — a certificate of insurance on file in advance, a booked service elevator, dock hours, sometimes an overnight security escort. Two buildings means two rule sets. See service elevator coordination for what that involves in practice.
The floors take more punishment. Commercial corridors have no rugs, no soft furnishing and much longer carry distances. Protection at both ends is not optional and it is more of it than a house needs.
The inventory is repetitive but personal. Twenty near-identical workstations, each one belonging to a specific person who will notice immediately if their second monitor went to someone else's desk.
The IT boundary is the line people get wrong
This is the single most common scoping mistake, so it is worth stating plainly.
A moving company does physical relocation. We move the equipment. We do not disconnect or reconnect networking, servers or workstations, and you should be suspicious of a mover who says they will.
Your IT provider — internal or contracted — handles the disconnect at the source and the reconnect at the destination. What matters is that the two schedules interlock:
- IT disconnects at the source before the crew arrives, not while the crew waits
- The crew places workstations at the destination before IT begins reconnecting, floor by floor rather than all at once
- Both sides hold each other's mobile numbers, and neither side finds out about a delay from you
Book the pre-move call between your IT provider and the moving crew lead. Fifteen minutes there prevents the most expensive failure mode in an office move, which is two teams idle in the same room waiting for each other.
Inventory documentation is what protects Monday
Every desk's contents go into labelled bins, and those bins go to that same desk at the new address. Every workstation is tagged. The floor plan says which tag lands where.
It sounds bureaucratic until you picture the alternative: a Monday morning where six people are hunting for their own monitors, and each search takes half an hour. The labour cost of that morning dwarfs the cost of doing the labelling properly on the Friday.
Decide early who does the desk-level packing. Either each person packs their own bin — cheap, and reliable if the deadline is communicated more than once — or a packing crew does it, which costs more and removes a variable. Both work. Deciding in the last week does not.
What sits inside the scope of the move
For a straightforward small office relocation, the work itself covers:
- Crew and truck sized to the inventory
- All protection materials — blankets, wrap, straps, corner guards, edge protection
- Floor protection along every path at both buildings
- Disassembly and reassembly of desks, benching, conference tables and modular furniture
- Loading dock and elevator coordination at both ends
- The certificate of insurance filed with both buildings
- Placement to the floor plan, workstation by workstation
What is scoped separately, and should be
These are real, and a plan that hides them is a plan that changes later:
- Packing service, if you want a crew to pack the desks and the kitchen rather than the team doing their own bins
- Specialist items — a safe, a production copier, a server rack, anything that needs a different piece of equipment and a different crew count. A floor printer moves as furniture; a floor-standing production device does not. See specialty and heavy items.
- Storage, if there is a gap between move-out and move-in — and there often is, because the two leases rarely align
- Disposal, for the furniture that is not making the trip
The five things that shape the job
If you want to know in advance whether your move is simple or complicated, look at these:
- Headcount. Workstations, chairs and monitors scale directly with people.
- Everything that is not a workstation. Meeting rooms, kitchen appliances, filing, storage cupboards, artwork, the things in the cupboard nobody has opened since the last move.
- IT scope. Boxed workstations only, or are there racks and servers in the plan?
- Building access at both ends. Dock, elevator, windows, escorts, and how far the carry is from truck to door.
- Timing. One weekend, or phased across two — a twenty-five person office is often better split than compressed.
Notice that none of those is the amount of furniture in isolation. Access and timing move the work more than volume does.
What to send for an accurate plan
For a plan you can actually schedule against, send:
- Headcount, and whether that equals workstation count
- A floor plan of both addresses, or a sketch with rough dimensions
- An inventory beyond the desks — meeting rooms, kitchen, filing, storage, artwork, anything oversized
- Your IT scope, and who is handling disconnect and reconnect
- Both buildings' rules: certificate requirements, elevator booking windows, dock hours
- The target shape of the weekend, and whether the date is fixed by a lease end
That comes back as a written scope and a proposed schedule, including where we think the risk sits. You are looking at both — the schedule tells you whether the plan is realistic, and the risk notes tell you whether the person who wrote it has done this before.
Questions that come up
Can we phase the move over two weekends? Often the better answer for a twenty to twenty-five person office. Split by criticality: the teams that cannot lose a day go first, the rest follow, and leadership moves last so there is continuity while the disruption happens.
What about the phones? On a hosted system the handsets are effectively plug-and-play once IT has the network up. On a legacy on-premises system, your telephony vendor handles the cutover — we move the physical handsets either way. Confirm which you have before the week of the move; it is a common surprise.
Can the move start Friday morning instead of the evening? Sometimes, if the office can afford the lost afternoon. Most teams prefer the evening start so the working day is not sacrificed to it.
What happens if the move runs long? Place the critical workstations first and finish the rest on the Monday. A team walking into a mostly-working office is a very different Monday from a team walking into a warehouse.
Describe your two buildings, your headcount and your window, and we will tell you what the weekend should look like — including the parts we think will be tight, in writing, before the date is held. Start your move brief, or call 778-994-2303. The wider scope sits on the commercial moving page.