Office removals with minimal downtime. Planned, insured, done.

Office removals in Rochester, Medway and Kent: how we plan them

Every commercial move we take on starts with a conversation about your business, not your furniture. What are your trading hours? When is your quiet period? Which team needs to be working again first? What cannot go down at all, even for an hour? The answers shape the plan: what moves first, what moves last, and whether the move happens on a Friday evening, across a weekend or in staged phases over several nights.

From our base in Rochester we handle commercial relocations across the whole of Kent: offices in Rochester and Chatham town centres, business parks in Gillingham and Medway City Estate, professional practices in Maidstone, warehouses and workshops in Strood and Sittingbourne, and retail units from Gravesend to Canterbury. We also move Kent businesses into and out of London regularly.

The result of proper planning is simple to describe: your team leaves work on Friday, and on Monday morning they sit down at their desks in the new premises with their monitors connected, their crates beside them and the phones working. That is the standard we plan to.

What our commercial removal service includes

• A pre-move site survey of both premises: access, lifts, loading bays, parking restrictions and anything that needs booking with a landlord or council in advance.
• A written move plan with a timeline, a floor plan for the new office and a named crew lead who runs the day and stays reachable throughout.
• Crates and packing: lidded plastic crates for files and equipment, labelled by desk or department, delivered ahead of the move so staff can pack their own workstations, or packed by our team if you prefer.
• Furniture handling: desks, benches, meeting tables and storage dismantled, moved and rebuilt to your new floor plan. Workstation layouts are photographed before disconnection so everything goes back the way it was.
• IT and electronics care: monitors, PCs, printers and phones individually wrapped, transported in padded conditions and placed desk by desk. We work alongside your IT provider so that disconnection and reconnection happen in the right order.
• Secure document transport: archives and confidential files moved in sealed crates, with chain-of-custody handling for anything sensitive.
• Property protection at both ends: floor coverings, door and lift protection, because dilapidations arguments with landlords are an expensive way to end a tenancy.
• Full insurance: goods-in-transit and public liability cover on every commercial job, with documentation your landlord or building manager can be sent in advance.

Out-of-hours and weekend moves

Most of our business customers move outside their trading hours, and we build our schedule around that. A typical pattern for an office of ten to thirty staff: crates delivered on Wednesday, staff pack their own desks by Friday lunchtime, our team packs the shared areas Friday afternoon, loads Friday evening, delivers and sets up Saturday, and IT reconnects on Sunday with time to spare before Monday. Larger moves phase over consecutive weekends, moving one department at a time so the business never fully stops.

Evening, weekend and bank holiday work is part of the service, not a premium bolt-on we surprise you with. Whatever schedule we agree in the plan is what the fixed quote covers.

How much does an office removal in Kent cost?

Commercial moves vary too much for a meaningful price list: a six-desk office above a shop in Rochester and a forty-desk floor in a Maidstone business park are different jobs. What we can promise is the structure of the price. After the site survey you get a fixed, itemised quote covering crew, vehicles, crates, packing, dismantling and rebuilding, protection and insurance. There are no hourly rates that reward slow work, and no surprise charges for stairs, waiting or weekend hours that were already in the plan.

As very rough orientation, small office moves within Medway start in the high hundreds of pounds, and most small-to-mid-size single-site relocations land in the £1,000 to £3,500 range depending on scale, distance and how much packing we do. The survey is free and without obligation, and it is the only honest way to price a commercial job.

Moving IT, machinery and the awkward stuff

Office moves are mostly desks and crates, but almost every business has its awkward items. We regularly move server cabinets, large-format printers, photocopiers, medical and dental equipment, gym machines, workshop tools, safes and fireproof cabinets. Heavy and sensitive items get their own handling plan: the right trolleys and skates, the right number of people, and where necessary a tail-lift vehicle scheduled specifically for them.

For servers and network equipment, we coordinate with your IT support so that shutdown, transport and rack rebuild follow their sequence, and cabling arrives labelled rather than as a bag of spaghetti. If you have machinery that needs specialist decommissioning, we will tell you plainly where our scope ends and help you source the right specialist rather than improvising with your equipment.

Storage between premises

Commercial timelines slip: fit-outs overrun, leases fail to align and sometimes a downsize means not everything fits the new floor plan. Our secure storage absorbs all of it. We can lift your entire office into storage at the end of one lease and deliver it into the new premises when the fit-out finishes, or store surplus furniture and archives long-term with an inventory so individual items can be retrieved. Storage, move and delivery run as one job with one point of contact.

Who we move

Since 2020 our commercial work across Medway and Kent has included accountancy and law firms, estate agencies, GP and dental practices, nurseries and schools, charities, gyms, salons, cafes and restaurants, workshops and trade counters, and plenty of home-based businesses stepping up into their first premises. References from business customers are available on request, and our reviews include commercial moves alongside the house moves.

Whatever your operation, the process starts the same way: call 01634 971005 or request a quote online, and we will arrange a free site visit. From the survey you get a written plan and a fixed quote, usually within one working day. From there, your move is scheduled, staffed and delivered by the same in-house crew from start to finish. No subcontractors, no surprises, and a Monday morning that feels like any other, just in a better office.

A worked example: twenty desks from Chatham to Maidstone

To make the process concrete, here is how a recent, typical relocation ran for a twenty-desk professional services firm moving from a Chatham office to a new floor in Maidstone. Tuesday, two weeks before the move: site survey at both ends, where we booked the loading bay slot with the Maidstone building manager and confirmed the goods lift dimensions. The following Monday: written plan and fixed quote signed off, crate delivery booked, and a desk-numbering plan agreed against the new floor layout so every crate and chair had a destination code.

Move week, Wednesday: eighty lidded crates delivered, two per desk plus shared areas. Friday, 1pm: staff finished packing their own crates and went home for the weekend. Friday, 2pm to 8pm: our crew packed the shared areas, photographed and disconnected workstations, dismantled desks and loaded the first vehicle. Saturday, 8am to 4pm: delivery and build at the Maidstone end, desks rebuilt to the numbered plan, monitors and chairs placed, crates stacked beside each desk. Sunday: the firm's IT provider reconnected and tested with our crew lead on call. Monday, 8.45am: staff sat down and worked. Total business downtime: zero trading hours.

Not every move is this tidy, and the plan exists precisely for the ones that are not: a lift that fails, a fit-out that finishes late, a department that cannot pack in time. The named crew lead absorbs those problems on the day, which is what businesses are really buying when they book us.

Your continuity checklist before moving day

The moves that go smoothly share the same customer-side preparation, so we share the list with every business we quote. Confirm your new premises' insurance, broadband and phone lines at least three weeks out, because connectivity lead times sink more office moves than furniture ever does. Update your registered address with Companies House, HMRC, your bank and your insurers in the same week. Tell your customers and suppliers the week before, not the week after. Nominate one person as move coordinator so our crew lead has a single counterpart, and give every member of staff one job for packing day: their own desk, into their own numbered crates, by an agreed deadline. We handle everything else.

Leaving the old office well: dilapidations and handback

A commercial move has two halves, and the second one, handing back your old premises, is where money quietly leaks if it is not planned. Most commercial leases in Kent end with a dilapidations obligation: the unit goes back to the landlord in an agreed condition, and every scuffed wall, abandoned desk and forgotten server cable becomes a line on a bill you receive after you have lost access to fix it cheaply.

We build the handback into the move plan. Floor and wall protection during loading is the first line of defence: the most common dilapidations damage happens during the move-out itself, when furniture is dragged rather than carried. Beyond that, we can clear what you are not taking: surplus desks and chairs to our storage, to a buyer, to charity or to licensed disposal, so the unit is genuinely empty rather than decorated with the furniture nobody wanted. We sweep through with you at the end of loading day, photograph the empty unit in its handback condition, and leave you with a record your solicitor will be glad exists if the landlord's schedule of dilapidations gets ambitious.

For businesses moving between managed buildings, we also handle the paperwork both building managers want: insurance certificates in advance, lift bookings, loading bay slots and named crew lists where security requires them. It is unglamorous work, but it is the difference between a move that glides through two sets of building rules and one that stalls in a loading bay at 7pm on a Friday.

A final word on timing your search. The best commercial moves are booked when the new lease is signed, not when the old one expires. That gap, usually six to twelve weeks in Kent, is exactly the window in which surveys, crate deliveries, IT lead times and weekend slots can be arranged calmly and cheaply. If you are reading this with a lease end four weeks away and nothing booked, do not panic, because we absorb short-notice moves most months, but do call today rather than Friday. The earlier we see your premises, the more options your fixed quote will contain, and the more Monday-morning-as-usual your move will feel. Call 01634 971005 and ask for a commercial site visit; it costs nothing and commits you to nothing.

And if your business sits somewhere between categories, a clinic with a waiting room of equipment, a school moving classrooms over the summer, a charity shop relocating stock and fittings, do not worry about whether you count as an office. Commercial simply means the move has to work around the people you serve, and that is the discipline we bring: a plan, a fixed price, a named crew lead, and a first morning in the new premises that feels like any other, only better.

Office removal questions, answered

The questions businesses ask most before moving premises in Medway and Kent. For anything specific to your operation, call 01634 971005.