Office Moving in Dubai
An office move is judged on one thing: whether people can work on Monday. Everything else is detail, and the way to protect it is to move outside working hours and to plan for the fit-out overrunning — which is the moving half of moving and storage in Dubai.
Collections are normally evenings or a weekend, because an office cannot be cleared around people working in it, and most Dubai commercial towers restrict move-outs to defined windows anyway.
Where the new floor is not finished — which is the normal case rather than the exception — everything goes into storage for the gap and comes back in stages as areas complete.
Plan for the fit-out overrunning
Fit-outs overrun. Not sometimes — as a rule, and usually by weeks rather than days, because approvals, contractor scheduling and snagging all compound. An office move plan that assumes the new floor is ready on the promised date is a plan with one point of failure in it.
The way to remove that failure is to decouple the two dates. Hand the old floor back on its date, store everything, and move in when the new floor is genuinely finished rather than nominally finished. Billing is monthly with no fixed end, so the overrun costs the weeks it costs and nothing else.
The alternative — extending the old lease at short notice — is almost always more expensive and sometimes not available at all, because the landlord has already re-let it.
Phased delivery back works well with this: as areas of the new floor are completed, the furniture for those areas comes back, so the business occupies the finished part while snagging continues elsewhere.
The office move checklist that protects Monday
- Confirm the move-out window and permit at the old building, and the move-in window at the new one.
- Back up and image every machine, and take drives out of anything critical. Storage should never be the only copy.
- Photograph each workstation's cable layout and bag cables per desk. This is the single biggest time saving on reassembly.
- Label by destination department and new-floor zone, not by which room it came from.
- Decide what is not going before the day. An office move is where the surplus furniture problem surfaces at 9pm.
- Keep licences, leases and statutory originals with you rather than in a crate — see office and relocation storage for the records side.
- Nominate one person on each side who can make decisions on the day, and make sure the crew knows who they are.
Scale and timing
| Office | Typical window | If it goes into storage |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 10 desks | An evening | 80–150 sq ft |
| 10–30 desks | A full day or a night | 150–400 sq ft |
| 30–60 desks | A weekend | 400–800 sq ft |
| 60+ desks | Phased over two weekends | Survey required |
Above about 30 desks we would rather survey than estimate. On an office move a wrong estimate is a Monday morning with no desks, which is a different order of problem from a domestic overrun.
Common questions
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Moving an office?
Assume the fit-out overruns and plan the storage for it. That single assumption protects the date.
+971 50 577 3388 · support@safestorage.ae · from 12.65 AED per sq ft, VAT included