Shiftingvala

Office Shifting: The Guide Nobody Gives You Until It's Too Late

Shifting a house is stressful enough. Shifting an office is a whole different beast — because it's not just furniture and clothes anymore, it's servers, files, client data, workstations, and a business that somehow has to keep running while all of this is happening around it.

Most companies realise this the hard way, usually a week before the move, when someone finally asks "wait, who's packing the server room?"

Why office shifting is nothing like home shifting

At home, worst case, you lose a coffee mug. At an office, worst case, you lose a hard drive with three years of client records on it, or a printer gets damaged the day before a big presentation. The stakes are just different, and so is the planning that goes into it.

There's also the timing problem. A house move can happen over a weekend without anyone really noticing. An office move usually has to work around business hours, client meetings, and sometimes even happen overnight or in phases so operations don't come to a complete halt. Then there's the equipment itself — computers, networking cables, printers, meeting room AV setups — none of which handle rough handling the way a sofa does.

And unlike a house, an office move isn't really "your" decision alone. There's a whole team whose desks, files, and daily routine are being uprooted, and everyone has an opinion about where their chair should go in the new space.

What actually needs to be planned

The mistake most businesses make is treating office shifting like a bigger version of house shifting. It's not. It needs its own checklist.

Start with an inventory — not just "we have 40 desks," but which equipment is fragile, which is sensitive (servers, routers, backup drives), and which needs specialised packing. IT equipment especially needs to be disconnected, labelled, and packed by someone who actually understands cabling, or you'll spend your first week in the new office just figuring out which cable went where.

Timing matters more here than almost anything else. Most businesses prefer moving over a weekend or during a planned downtime, so client-facing work isn't disrupted. If that's not possible, moving department by department — instead of everything at once — keeps at least part of the business functional throughout.

Then there's the new space itself. It needs to be ready before moving day, not after. Electrical points, internet connections, workstation layout — all of it should be sorted in advance, because nothing kills momentum like your team arriving at a new office with no wifi and half the desks missing.

And documentation — client files, contracts, physical records — needs a plan of its own. These aren't things you casually toss into a box; they need proper labelling and, in a lot of cases, someone specifically responsible for them during the move.

Why you shouldn't try to handle this internally

Some businesses try to save cost by getting existing staff to pack up the office themselves over a weekend. It sounds efficient on paper, but it rarely goes well. Your team isn't trained to pack a server rack, and you're basically pulling people away from actual work to do a job neither they nor the company gets any long-term benefit from.

A professional office shifting team, on the other hand, comes in knowing exactly how to handle IT equipment, how to sequence the move so nothing critical goes missing, and how to get a business back up and running with minimal downtime. That last part — downtime — is really the thing that costs businesses the most, far more than the moving bill itself.

What to look for in an office moving partner

Not every mover who does house shifting is equipped to handle offices, and that distinction matters. Ask specifically if they've handled commercial or corporate relocations before, not just residential ones. Ask how they handle IT equipment and electronics — this is usually where the real experience shows.

Check if they can work around your business hours or move overnight/weekends if needed, since that flexibility isn't something every company offers. And get clear numbers upfront — office moves often involve more variables (equipment insurance, weekend surcharges, packing materials for electronics), so vague quotes tend to turn into unpleasant surprises on the final bill.

How Shifting Vala handles office moves

At Shifting Vala, office and commercial shifting is treated as its own category, not a bigger version of household shifting. Our team plans around your business hours, handles IT equipment and sensitive documents with the care they actually need, and