Office Move - Purdie Worldwide
For an office move, a particularly logical mind is required. Perfect for our latest office move candidate, Jabil. Originally founded in the USA back in the 1960s manufacturing early computer circuit boards, Jabil grew exponentially expanding to many countries across the world and acquiring many other smaller companies.
Unfortunately after the recession of the mid 2000s things took a slightly downward turn and due to cheaper manufacturing costs in other countries, Jabil decided to close it’s Livingston branch in 2017. Now trying to downsize their sizeable Scottish operation, Jabil tasked us with dismantling over 300 desks to be reused and recycled as part of an office move. Here’s how we did this specialist office move:
To load or not to load...
Before any move takes place, whether it be a domestic house move or a commercial office relocation, any professional removal company will send out a qualified surveyor to assess the access at the property and gauge the volume in ft³ as best they can.
For this job, there were over 300 desks that needed to be dismantled. Each desk was approximately 54ft³ (6x3x3ft) and if you multiply that by the 300 desks you’d need over 16000ft³ of transport space! With our largest truck only capable of holding 2600ft³ it would take 7 trips to load and then unload the desks. Being the environmentally responsible company that we are, this wasn’t acceptable, nor profitable. So before we loaded all the desks onto the truck it was decided to dismantle the desks into stackable units that would utilise the space most efficiently.
Dismantling
As a Professional Removal company all of our staff are highly trained and in particular some are more gifted at dismantling than others. So our 2 best dismantlers Scott and Kris were on this particular job.
The job line called for standard tools for dismantling, but what they hadn’t counted on is that these desks weren’t of the average Ikea variety and used a secure Torx head on all the bolts and 13mm nuts. Fortunately Kris carries these Torx heads in his toolkit, so whilst he started on the bolts, Scott started with the nuts using the 13mm spanner.
After the first hour only 4 desks had been dismantled. At this pace things were going to take longer than we had planned for. So although a good workman never blames his tools, the guys felt they would get on quicker with a proper socket set and a ratchet spanner for the nuts.
Following a swift delivery of new tools from the office, the pace did indeed increase, and by the end of day just over half the desks had been dismantled.
Loading
On day 2 the morning was spent with an extra man dismantling all of the tables. By lunch break every single desk had been dismantled and placed into 3 main piles.
The main desk tops were split and laid on their side against each other. Each drawer set was removed and these packed together like tetris bricks very nicely. The last pile had all the desk sides along with all the metal frame work.
Office Moves - Essential Tools
With the the use of our Magliners all of the drawer units could be loaded into the first of our big vans, with the metal framework managing to fit into two 3.5t vans. The desk tops had to be handballed as they were too big for the Magliners, and this took up the rest of the afternoon.
