The guide
Moving Home Tech and Office Kit in London with a Man and Van in full
What a one-desk move actually looks like
Two movers, a Luton with a tail lift, and roughly two hours door to door on a typical inner-London hop: thirty minutes to wrap and load, thirty to drive, forty to carry in and set the desk back up, with the rest as contingency for stairs and parking.
Add a second desk and you add about forty minutes, not another two hours — the drive and the setup overhead are already paid for. That is the main reason it pays to move a whole home office in one booking rather than shuttling it in a car over three evenings.
- One desk, two monitors, tower and chair: around 2 hours, 2 movers
- Two desks and a filing cabinet: around 2 hours 40
- Add 15 minutes per floor above the second without a lift
- Add 20 minutes if screens are not boxed when the crew arrives
Screens: the one thing that must be packed properly
Monitors and TVs are the only genuinely fragile part of a tech move and they fail the same way every time: laid flat, something stacked on the panel, a hairline pressure crack that only shows when it is powered up at the other end.
Screens travel upright in a screen box or a flat-screen crate, strapped to the van wall, with nothing leaning on them. If you kept the original boxes, use them — a manufacturer's polystyrene insert beats anything else. If not, ask us to bring screen boxes on the booking rather than hoping blankets will do.
Towers, drives and the things worth doing the night before
Desktop towers travel upright and strapped, never flat, because a heavy graphics card levers on its slot over every speed bump between Hackney and Hounslow. Shut down NAS units and external drives properly rather than pulling the plug.
Twenty minutes the night before saves an evening at the other end. Photograph the back of every device, tape and label the cables at both ends, and put every small item — screws, monitor arm bolts, dongles, the one HDMI cable that works — into a single labelled box that rides in the cab rather than the load.
- Photograph the back of the tower, monitors and router before unplugging
- Label both ends of every cable with tape and a marker
- One 'cab box' for screws, bolts, dongles and drives
- Back up anything that exists in one place only
Desks, monitor arms and chairs
Most sit-stand desks come apart into a top and a frame in about fifteen minutes with an allen key, and going through a London stairwell in one piece is rarely worth the risk to the paintwork. Monitor arms unclamp in a minute and travel with the desk, not the monitor.
Office chairs come apart at the gas lift with a firm pull, but a good one does not need to — a chair fits through most doors as it is. Tell us the desk model at booking and the crew brings the right tools rather than borrowing yours.
Insurance limits on electronics — read this bit
Goods in transit cover applies to your tech while it is in our care, but two limits matter more than the headline number: the per-item limit and the treatment of self-packed boxes.
If you packed the monitor yourself in a box you found, cover is typically limited to external damage rather than a cracked panel inside an intact carton. If a single item is worth more than the standard per-item limit — a high-end camera body, a workstation, a large OLED — declare it at booking so it is listed and covered specifically.
- Declare any single item above the standard per-item limit
- Professionally packed screens carry fuller cover than self-packed
- Keep laptops, phones and drives with you, not in the load
- Check the sum insured covers the whole setup, not just the biggest item
Parking, lifts and getting the kit inside
The kit is not the problem; the last thirty metres is. Tell us where the van can legally stop at both ends, whether the block has a goods lift and whether it needs booking, and how many steps there are before the front door.
In controlled bays a suspension takes five to ten working days in most boroughs, so if there is nowhere to stop outside, say so at booking rather than on the morning. A crew carrying screens two hundred metres down a Georgian terrace is slower and riskier than a crew with a bay.