How to plan an office move in Des Moines
Most office moves in the Des Moines metro are small by national standards: a suite in a West Des Moines office park, a floor downtown, a clinic moving across Ankeny. A household move has one decision maker and one set of belongings. An office has a landlord at each end, a building with rules, a network that has to come back up, and a room full of people who each think their desk is the priority.
This is the planning sequence from the day the lease is signed to the Monday after. The certificate of insurance most Des Moines buildings ask for has its own guide, linked at the end.
Eight weeks out: one person, one list, two landlords
The first decision is who owns the move, and it should be one person with the authority to say no. A move run by committee ends with the crew standing in a corridor waiting for someone to decide where the conference table goes. Name a coordinator, give them the floor plan, and route every question through them.
Then read both leases. The one you are leaving will say what condition the space has to be returned in, whether you are responsible for removing cabling and built-in furniture, and how much notice the building needs before a move-out. The one you are entering will say when you can start moving in, usually after the tenant improvements are signed off and not a day before. The gap between those dates is the window you are planning inside, and it is often narrower than anyone assumed.
Ask both buildings the same questions now: which entrance and elevator a crew can use, whether the freight elevator has to be reserved, what hours moves are allowed, where a truck can park, and whether they want a certificate of insurance before the crew arrives. Downtown Des Moines buildings and the managed office parks will almost all say yes to that last one.
Six weeks out: decide what is not moving
Every office has furniture that will not fit the new plan, cabinets of paper nobody has opened in years, and equipment that has been broken long enough to become part of the room. Moving it is the most expensive thing you can do with it: you pay to carry it out and in, then pay again to have it removed.
Walk the floor with the new plan and mark each piece as moving, selling, donating or going. Do it now, because donation pickups and used furniture buyers work on their own schedules, and a cleanout of what remains is a separate job for the days after the move rather than something squeezed into it.
Records with a retention requirement go in labeled, sealed boxes. Everything else is a shredding job, and a box of paper is as heavy as anything in the building.
- Every desk, chair, table and cabinet tagged as moving, selling, donating or going
- Records that must be kept, boxed and labeled by department
- Paper that can be shredded, separated before the crew is on the clock
- Equipment that needs a specialist rather than a mover: a plotter, a safe, anything under a service contract
- Items that belong to the landlord, which stay and must not be loaded
Four weeks out: the network, the phones, the mail
The move that goes wrong at an office is rarely the furniture. It is the Monday morning when the internet is not connected and nobody can work. Service at a new commercial address can take weeks to provision, so order it as soon as the move-in date is known, with installation booked for the week before the move.
The same applies to everything that arrives at the old address. File the business change of address with the postal service, update the bank and every vendor that invoices you, and update your website and Google Business Profile the same week, or customers searching for you will be sent to an empty suite.
Decide who disconnects and reconnects the computers: an IT provider, or the crew moving labeled crates and staff plugging their own machines back in. Both work. Discovering on the day that nobody knows which cable goes where does not.
Two weeks out: a label system the crew can read
The floor plan for the new space is the most important document in the move. Number every room and desk position on it, put the same numbers on the walls at the destination, and label every box and piece of furniture with the number of where it is going. A crew that can match a number on a box to a number on a door can place the whole office without asking a question.
Give each person one rule for their desk: everything in the drawers and on the surface goes in a crate with their name and destination number, sealed before they leave on the last day. Personal items go home with them. Nobody packs on the day, because by then the crew is on the clock.
Confirm the crew's timing against both buildings' rules. If the origin allows moves only after six and the destination's freight elevator is reserved from eight the next morning, that is the schedule, and the estimate has to be built around it.
The move weekend and the Monday after
Have the coordinator at the origin when the crew arrives and at the destination when the first truck does. Walk each building with the crew lead first: which elevator, which doors, where the floor protection goes, which items stay. Ten minutes there saves an hour of questions.
Place what people need first: workstations, the network cabinet and reception before storage rooms and the kitchen. If the network installer is coming Saturday, the server room is clear of boxes by Saturday morning.
Keep Monday light: staff arrive to a desk, a working connection and a labeled crate, and nothing else is scheduled. A box in the wrong room is a small Monday problem. A team that cannot log in is not.