Office Relocation Checklist for Toronto Businesses: 8 Weeks to Move Day | G&T Moving Blog

Name one person inside the company who owns the move. Not a committee: one coordinator who answers the mover, the landlord, and the staff. When that role is split, small decisions wait until move night.

Then get the building rules from both property managers in writing. Most Toronto office towers and many plazas control when a mover can work, which entrance and elevator can be used, and what insurance is required. These rules decide your date, not the other way round.

A commercial move lives or dies on the item list. Either you give us exact counts of what is moving, or we come to the site and quote it in person — and for anything beyond a small office, the site visit is usually the better call. The reason is timing: commercial jobs almost always run inside a fixed window, so the crew has to be sized for the real scope up front. When the scope is accurate we staff the job to cover every step; when it is a guess, something gets discovered at 9pm on a Saturday.

Walk the floor and sort everything into four groups: moving, disposing, storing temporarily, and new items arriving at the new space. The storage group is the one people forget, and it changes the plan more than any other — a move that runs straight from A to B is a very different job from one that has to hold furniture for a week between leases.

Book the service elevator and loading dock at both addresses for the same window, then confirm the moving date with your mover. Send the certificate holder wording as soon as you have it. We issue certificates of insurance the same day, but building managers often want them several days ahead.

For budgeting, office moves are billed hourly for crew and truck together. With G&T that is $150 per hour for three movers with a 26 ft truck and $195 per hour for four, with a 2-hour minimum, plus a fuel and travel surcharge. Most office floors need three or four movers because of the chair and workstation count. Work outside normal hours carries an additional fee, which is confirmed when the window is quoted.

Decide who disconnects, moves, and reconnects the computers, and who handles the power and furniture at the new space. These are usually three different contractors, and the gaps between them are where the first morning goes wrong.

For most offices we recommend your own team disconnects the equipment and labels the cables and machines with stickers before move day — nobody knows your setup better, and it is the cheapest way to do it. We then wrap, transport, and place the hardware. If you would rather we handled disconnection, cable management, and packing, our IT crew does that work at $200 per hour.

If the new space needs desks assembled, cubicle panels installed, power run to workstations, or TVs and whiteboards mounted, it can be booked with the move. Our crew includes general installers and a licensed electrician with more than 10 years of experience, so the furniture and the power are done in the same visit.

Print the new floor plan, give each room or zone a colour, and put a matching sticker on every desk, cabinet, chair, box, and machine. On move night the crew places by colour without stopping to ask, and nothing gets stacked in a corridor and carried twice.

Reconfirm the elevator booking, security access, and dock time with both buildings 48 hours before the move. Make sure your coordinator and the mover’s lead have each other’s numbers.

Commercial jobs are led on site by the owner, not handed to a dispatcher. You have one direct number from the walk-through to the last piece placed, and someone answers it during the move — including at midnight. The crew is our own team, working to written rules: assigned roles, items inventoried and tagged before they leave the floor, nothing opened or set aside without the client’s say-so, and every area walked again before we leave. Your furniture, equipment, and records are treated as company assets, because that is what they are.

Before the crew leaves the old space, walk it together and check every room and storage closet. At the new space, walk it again with the floor plan in hand.

Keep a short list of anything that needs adjusting: a desk in the wrong zone, a monitor arm, a shelf to rehang. Small corrections are much easier while the crew who did the move still remembers the layout. Return keys and fobs at the old address, collect your elevator deposits, and update your address with suppliers, clients, Google Business Profile, and Canada Post.

Send your item counts, both addresses, and the building rules, or ask us to walk the space. Our office and commercial moving page covers the crew, installation and IT options, and the commercial rates in full.