Planning an office move in Portland without losing a workday

Start with the two buildings

Ordering boxes feels like progress on day one, but the two buildings control the schedule, and their calendars fill up long before yours does.

Call the property manager at each end and get the loading rules in writing. Ask when the dock is open and whether it requires a reservation. Ask which elevator handles freight, how it gets booked, and how far out the calendar runs. In downtown Portland towers the freight elevator is often shared by every tenant on twenty floors, and the building may require moves to happen after 6pm or on weekends. Some buildings also require padding in the elevator cab and floor protection through the lobby, and they will want to know who is installing it.

Property managers in managed buildings almost always require a certificate of insurance from any vendor working on site, naming the building with specific coverage language. Collect the COI requirements from both buildings early and pass them along during the quote process, so the paperwork is settled before the crew is standing at a locked dock. Handling COIs is routine work for a commercial moving operation as long as the requirements arrive with some lead time.

Then work out where the truck will stand. A private dock or garage solves it. If street loading is unavoidable, reserved curb space in Portland goes through PBOT's Temporary Street Use Permitting process, and the review and sign requirements add days of lead time. The moving truck parking permit guide walks through that process in detail.

Inventory and sequencing

Start the inventory from the new floor plan. Count the seats, the conference rooms, and the storage, then work out what from the old office fits. Most offices find they are moving less than they thought, and finding that out before packing day saves a full round of handling.

Decommission and purge before the move. Surplus desks, dead monitors, chairs nobody claimed, and the file boxes from a vendor who closed in 2019 should leave the building on their own schedule, through donation, resale, or e-waste. Furniture that is on its way out of the company anyway should not take up truck space and crew time first.

Everything that remains gets a tag: every desk, chair, monitor, and file cabinet carries a label that maps it to a seat number, a room, or a storage area on the new floor plan. The crew should never have to ask where something goes while holding it.

Then sequence the load so the last things on the truck are the first things off. Whatever people need on the first morning, the front desk workstations, the sales team's monitors, the one printer everyone uses, loads last and comes off first. Archives and spare furniture load early and can even skip the new office entirely. If the new space is not ready for everything, or the two leases do not overlap cleanly, storage can hold the overflow so it does not end up stacked in a conference room you need on Monday.

The IT plan decides the downtime

Furniture that shows up late is an inconvenience people work around for a day. An internet circuit that is not live on the first morning stops the office cold, so the network deserves more planning attention than anything that rides on the truck.

Order the cutover at the new address as early as the lease allows. Carrier installs commonly take several weeks, and a new circuit in an older building can take longer. Before signing anything, check what service is available at the address with the FCC's National Broadband Map, then confirm the install date with the carrier and hold them to it.

Divide the technical work cleanly. Your IT people or your IT vendor disconnect and reconnect the servers, networking gear, and workstations, since they know the passwords, the configurations, and the order things have to come back up. The movers handle safe transport and staging, with each machine padded, boxed, and delivered to the right seat. Labels hold that split together: mark every cable, dock, monitor, and tower with a seat number before disconnect, and the IT team can reconnect one row at a time.

Phones, printers, and conference room gear belong on the same list. Offices arrive with nobody in charge of the printer setup more often than you would guess.

Employee packing that gets done

Employee packing only happens if it is treated as an assignment rather than a suggestion, and the assignment that works is one container and one deadline.

Give each person one crate or box for the contents of their own desk, labeled with their name and their new seat number, and set a firm deadline, usually end of day before the move. Capping it at one container makes people sort their drawers now instead of shipping the clutter to a new address.

Personal items should ride home in each employee's own car: plants, framed photos, the good headphones, the spare chargers. Nobody wants to file a claim over a succulent, and a back seat carries one more safely than a truck full of desks.

Assign a named owner to each common area: the kitchen, the supply room, reception, and every conference room. Shared spaces tend to go unpacked because everyone assumes someone else has them, so put the names on the move plan next to the rooms.

Schedule a purge day before packing day, with bins out, a shred vendor if needed, and clear permission to throw things away. A lot of what sits in office drawers is there because nobody ever said it could go.

Timing the move to protect the workweek

The move itself usually lands on an evening or a weekend, for good reason. A Friday evening start means the crew has the dock, the freight elevator, and empty corridors to work with. IT then has the whole weekend to bring the network back up, and the business opens as usual on Monday. Many managed buildings will not allow it any other way.

Larger offices phase it. Departments move over successive evenings or weekends, and each phase is a complete unit: furniture, files, and workstations for that group, staged so the group works from the new space the next morning while the rest of the office runs from the old one. Phasing takes more coordination, but at no point does the whole business stop.

Decide what stays live until the last day. Usually that is the phone system, one printer, and the workstations for whoever faces customers. Those are the last things disconnected and the first things reconnected, so they load last.

Portland adds a wrinkle or two of its own. Tower freight elevator calendars downtown fill weeks out, so the building reservation is often the real limit on the date. The route between the two buildings also matters at the hour you are driving it; a crew crossing the Morrison Bridge at 5pm on a Friday barely moves. Check TripCheck for closures and conditions on the route the evening of the move, and let the crew route around what it shows.

A 7-item office move checklist

1. Get dock hours, freight elevator reservations, and COI requirements from both buildings in writing.
2. Order the internet cutover at the new address and confirm the install date with the carrier.
3. Build a tagged inventory that maps every desk, chair, monitor, and cabinet to a destination on the new floor plan.
4. Run decommission and purge before packing day so nothing rides the truck twice.
5. Book your IT people or vendor for disconnect at the old office and reconnect at the new one, with every cable and machine labeled to a seat.
6. Issue one labeled crate per employee with a firm deadline, and assign named owners to every common area.
7. Walk both spaces with the moving crew lead before move day and agree on the load sequence.