How to move a home office
A lot of people in the Des Moines metro work from a spare bedroom now, and a move lands differently on them than on the household around them. Everyone else loses a weekend. They risk losing a work week, and the things that cause it are small: a monitor packed flat under a box of books, a laptop charger left in a drawer that went on the truck, a client file that was in the pile that got shredded.
This is the room to pack yourself, carefully, and to move partly in your own car. What follows is how to do that, what a crew can and cannot be handed, and how to have a working desk at the other end before the rest of the house is anywhere near unpacked.
Two weeks out: back everything up, then back it up again
Before a single cable is unplugged, every machine in the room gets backed up somewhere that is not in the room. A cloud service, an external drive that travels in your bag, or both. A computer is replaceable in a day. What is on it may not be replaceable at all, and a moving truck is a place where things get dropped, get hot, get cold and get stacked under other things.
The same week, photograph the back of every device with its cables plugged in. Nobody remembers which port the second monitor used, and a photograph on your phone answers the question on Monday morning in ten seconds.
Tell work, if you have a manager, which day you will be offline and which day you will be back. It is a far easier conversation two weeks out than as a message at nine on the Monday.
What travels in your car and never on the truck
The laptop, its charger, the phone charger, the external drive, the password notebook if you keep one, and the documents you would not want to lose. Those ride with you, and so does anything under a client confidentiality agreement, because a box on a truck is out of your control for the length of the drive and a locked bag in your car is not.
Paper documents are the thing people underestimate. Tax records, contracts, signed originals, anything with an account number. Sort them before the move into what goes in your bag, what goes in a sealed and labeled file box, and what gets shredded, and do the shredding early, because a box of paper is one of the heaviest boxes in the house and the easiest one to regret moving.
- Laptop, chargers, external drive, and anything you cannot work without on Monday
- Original documents: contracts, tax files, identification, signed paperwork
- The router and the modem if you own them, so the internet can be set up first
- Ink, toner, and anything that leaks when it is hot or cold
- Small valuable equipment: a camera, a microphone, a drawing tablet
Packing the desk: monitors, the tower, the printer
Monitors break in two ways: pressure on the panel, and a corner hit. The original box with its foam solves both, and it is worth keeping for exactly this. Without it, wrap the screen in a soft cloth, then bubble wrap, then stand it upright in a box that is bigger than the screen with padding on every side, and label the box on all four faces with what it is and which way is up. A monitor packed flat under anything is a monitor that arrives with a crack.
A desktop tower goes in a box with padding around it, upright, and with the cables removed and bagged. Unplug everything, take the photograph, and put the cables in a labeled bag taped to the box that holds the device they belong to. A box of loose cables from four devices is an afternoon's work to sort.
Printers travel badly if there is ink in them. Remove the cartridges, bag them, and keep them with the things that ride in the car. A printer with the cartridges in that goes on a hot truck arrives with the ink somewhere other than the cartridges.
The furniture, and the sit-stand desk problem
A plain desk moves like any other table. A sit-stand desk is heavier than it looks, top-heavy when it is raised, and the motor and the control panel do not like being tipped. Lower it fully, unplug it, remove the top from the frame if the frame allows it, bag the bolts, and tell the crew what it is. Most of them have moved dozens; the ones that break are the ones nobody mentioned.
Filing cabinets go empty. A full two-drawer cabinet is a dangerous lift and the drawers slide open on the ramp. Empty each drawer into a file box in order, label the box with the cabinet and the drawer, and it goes back together in a few minutes at the other end.
The office chair is easy and the most commonly damaged, because it is loaded last and lands on top of something. Take the base off if it lifts out, and wrap the arms.
The other end: a working desk before the rest of the house
Have the internet at the new address ordered and installed before the move rather than after it. Providers in the metro book installation days out, and the week after a move is the wrong time to find that out. If the connection is not ready on the Monday, know where you will work: a library, a coffee shop, the phone's hotspot.
Then set the office up first. The desk in position, the chair, the monitor connected from the photograph, the router on, and the rest of the house can stay in boxes. A working desk on the first day is the difference between a move that cost a weekend and one that cost a week.