How to handle a small office move

On Friday evening you switch everything off, and on Monday morning someone has to be able to work. That is what separates moving a house from moving an office: at home you can sleep among the boxes for a week and nobody notices, in an office a client notices the half day when the phone goes unanswered.

The volume is not the problem. A small office is four desks, two cupboards of ring binders, the monitors and a printer: less stuff than a house holds. What changes is the time window, which is almost always a weekend and which you do not choose, and the fact that in the end everything has to work, not just have arrived.

Start with the things that have a waiting time

Before the list of objects, make the list of functions: the phone number, the internet line, the network printer, the drive or the server where the shared files live, the card reader if you take payments on site. For each one write down two things only, who supplies it and how many days they need to switch it on at the new address.

Then put them in order by waiting time and not by size. That is the criterion that decides the date of everything else: in that list the line is almost always the item with the longest wait, it depends on a supplier and on an engineer who turns up when they can, and until you have that date you cannot pin the other dates down. The big things to move, by contrast, get moved in a day, and those are the ones people look at first and the ones that almost never drive the calendar. Without a calendar that counts backwards these lines have nowhere to sit: start from the moving checklist and write them into it.

The archive is packed in pieces, not in a day

Paper is the heavy part and it always gets underestimated: a shelf of ring binders looks like nothing until you lift it. The practical rule is the one from home: if you cannot lift the box comfortably on your own, take something out and split it across two.

The other thing is that an archive is not packed in one session. You do it in pieces, in half an hour stolen between two meetings, and meanwhile the office is working: the binder you put away on Tuesday is the one you need on Thursday, and the box you closed two days ago has to be opened again. Counted in operations, with cardboard every reopening is tape cut and tape put back on. A Cangubox is a box made of rigid polypropylene with the lid attached on top: two flaps hinged on the long sides, which you lift to open and lower to close, with nothing to buy and nothing to peel off. The declared load capacity is 30 kg per box, and a closed, loaded box holds another one on top: the archive stands in a column in a corner instead of spread over the desks people work at.

Keep a list of what is inside. A numbered tag on every box, and next to the number what it holds and who is carrying it: for the files with client data, that is what puts you in a position to answer if somebody asks where they have gone.

Everyone clears their own desk, the cables are another matter

The drawers are emptied by the person who works at them, by a date you set. What gets thrown out of a drawer is known only by its owner, and this is the part that really can be delegated.

The cables are another matter. There you want one person and one method: photograph the back of every machine before you unplug it, and the cables of one workstation travel tied together and not in a shared bag. Monitors go on their own, upright, with nothing heavy resting on them. Desks that come apart should be taken apart beforehand, and the screws from the tops and the legs go in the bag taped to the piece, as with furniture at home.

This is also the point where calling a removal company is the right choice: a security cabinet, a large photocopier, a narrow flight of stairs, or the fact that the two people who work there cannot spend Monday with a bad back. There is also a third way, and for an office it works: they do the transport on moving day, you do the packing without hurry in the weeks before.

The day itself, and the Monday after

A van outside the front door is not a given, above all in the centre: in many towns the space has to be requested from the council, and how the procedure works is in the van parking permit.

We can deliver the boxes to the address you are leaving and collect them at the new one: we deliver to Milan, the covered postcodes of its hinterland and the province of Monza and Brianza. Every rental also comes with the Dolly: a platform on four swivel castors, where you stack the boxes, and along a corridor or in a lift you push the column instead of walking back and forth. How many you need, and which kit that makes, you work out on the home page. The boxes you have emptied do not stay in the way either: with the flaps up one goes inside the next, and the stack waiting for collection sits low in a corner.

Unloading then runs in the reverse order of the list you started from: first what has to work on Monday at nine, that is the desks and the line, then the rest, and the archive last. It weighs more than all the rest and it is the only thing that can wait until Wednesday.