Are you closing your office? Whether it’s because your current location cannot accommodate your operation requirements or you are shutting down the business, there is a long list of things that need to happen to make sure your lease-end obligations are met.

There are three main things to consider:

1. Removal of Large Items

• Furniture (desks, couches, chairs, etc): Commercial furniture liquidation companies ensure that furniture is repurposed, recycled or moved with care. We all know how expensive office furniture can be, so even if it’s being removed, it should be done with as much care as when it was installed.

• HVAC unit(s): Heating and air conditioning units are bulky and have a lot of components that require proper disposal.

• AV equipment: This includes all video conferencing systems, projectors, and televisions. Display monitors must be carefully removed from the walls to minimize damage, especially if they are larger than 55” wide.

• Floor Printers: Depending on the current state of the printer, they can either be resold, recycled, moved to another location or returned to the leasing company.

• Signage, art or other installations: Whether they are large electrical neon signs, paintings, or other unique kinds of art installations, they are important pieces of an office that you may not want disposed of or sold. It’s best to hire a specialty moving company that can handle the careful packing and removal of the items.

2. Removal of Smaller Items in Large Quantities

• Data cabling: As a company that has helped clients remove over 15 million feet of cables from the walls and ceilings for commercial office decommission projects, we can tell you that this process takes time and the right amount of man-power to get it done to allow for the walls to be repatched and painted or for the ceilings to be re-tiled. This process alone can take between several days to multiple weeks depending on the number of floors and square footage of the office space.

• Server Rack Decommission: The security of your data doesn’t stop being important if you’re closing an office. In fact, it’s even more important. Servers, hard drives and other network equipment that holds sensitive or proprietary information of any kind should be recycled and/or destroyed following proper NIST 800-88 standards if it’s no longer needed.

• Electrical: This includes both electrical cabling running through the walls, ceilings and floors as well as removal of electrical furniture whips.

Did you know that…sometimes data cabling and electrical cabling are bundled together in the walls. If the different cables are not separated carefully before cutting and removing them, it’s a possible electrocution risk for the technicians.

Workstation technology (monitors, docks, mice, keyboards, laptops, desktop printers, etc): For small offices this can be done in a day or two with a small team of technicians, but if it’s a large office and if there is a requirement to inventory and/or track every item, at least 1-2 weeks should be allocated to complete it. Monitors, docks, laptops and printers are all still considered IT assets for the company so treating them as such during the decommissioning process retains their value. Normally mice and keyboards are tossed because of dirt build-up unless they are the user’s personal property in which case users should take them home before the start of the decommissioning project to avoid risk of loss or damage.

Hot Tip: Certified IT asset disposition, for recycling of old IT equipment, is a beneficial add-on service to include in budgets – it also keeps the company’s environmental impact of the decommission to a minimum.

Removing AV equipment, data cabling, workstation technology, and printers from your office is Unio Tech’s specialty. We also help with removing HVAC systems and electrical. Learn more about how we help clients who are shutting down their offices here.

3. Repair & Restore

Once all of the furniture and technology is removed from the space, the repair and restoration process can begin. This includes disposing of all the garbage, patching and priming walls, cleaning the floors (vacuuming, wiping down surfaces, etc.).

A few other things to keep in mind to make the decommission process more efficient for the on-site teams:

• The need for access to loading docks will increase during the decommission process, so helping the on-site teams arrange that in advance is an important coordination tip.

• Sharing the lease-end requirements with on-site team leads helps ensure all decommissioning activities are completed thoroughly and no critical details are overlooked.

If your decommission schedule is delayed in any way, it means that the teams on the ground have less time to complete their work. Giving yourself extra buffer in the schedule for contingency days (in case of delays) will save you loads of stress as the days count down to the close-out documentation being signed.

Our goal is to “leave the space better than you found it” – so we do whatever is needed to ensure that the final condition of the office before you hand back the keys to the owner is better than how you got the space initially.

Get ahead of the schedule and book a free walkthrough of your office today: 1-833-832-6683