A two-floor office, the client's facility access protocol, full disassembly and disposal, warehouse storage, and a temporary relocation with leadership moved first. Here is how the project was run.
By Pablo Giordano, Owner, Ontrack Moving® • June 2026, updated September 2026 • 10 min read
A U.S. Department of Defense contractor in the Bay Area needed to clear a two-floor office for a full renovation, under a security protocol that ruled out most of the moving companies they called. This is an anonymized account of how Ontrack Moving planned and ran that project, from the first phone call through disposal, storage, and a temporary relocation.
In short: the client required a crew of U.S. citizens, daily check-in, and a single badge that opened the designated doors, which were kept closed between passes. Several other companies could not field enough citizen-status crew to staff it. As an asset-based carrier that employs its own crews, Ontrack Moving could.
The work spanned full furniture disassembly, disposal of the majority of the contents, warehouse storage of the retained items, and a phased temporary relocation with leadership moved first. A color-label system sorted every item into one of three streams: disposal, storage, or the temporary office. For projects like this, see our Bay Area commercial movers and commercial storage pages.
The client opened the very first call with the part that mattered most to them. Their facility operated under a strict access protocol. Every worker who entered the building had to be a U.S. citizen, and the crew checked in each day. The facility issued a single badge to open the designated doors, and those doors were kept closed between passes, so the team coordinated that one badge to open and close on every pass in and out with loaded equipment. The crew coordinated entry and exit around that access procedure throughout the work.
They were calling Ontrack Moving because several other companies had not worked out. The recurring problem was staffing: those companies could not field enough citizen-status crew to complete a job of this size under the requirement. For a large two-floor decommissioning that runs across multiple days, a mover needs a full team that clears the access standard every single day, not just a name or two.
This is exactly where the asset-based model matters. Ontrack Moving owns its trucks and employs its own crews under USDOT #2551548. The crews are direct employees, not a subcontracted team booked through a broker. Ontrack staffed the work to the client's citizenship and facility access requirements.
On this project, direct staffing helped Ontrack meet the client's access requirements. You can read more about how that distinction works on our carrier versus broker guide and what a certificate of insurance actually proves.
The project began the way every commercial job of this size should, with an on-site survey. Walking both floors first made it possible to map what would be retained, what would be cleared, what equipment the building would require, and the order the work needed to follow.
Before anything moved, the survey drove a simple organizing system. Every item was tagged with a color label marking its destination, so the crew always knew at a glance whether a piece was bound for disposal, for storage, or for the temporary office. On a job where three different end points ran in parallel, that color coding kept the streams from getting crossed.
Most of what the office held was being retired with the old build-out, so the larger share of the job was disassembly and disposal: breaking down cubicle systems into manageable components and clearing them out floor by floor. The portion the client chose to keep was disassembled, prepared, and inventoried into storage vaults at the Ontrack Moving warehouse, held there through the roughly ten-month renovation and returned to the finished building in a second phase described below.
Among the items that had to come out was a heavy piece of machinery on the second floor, with no elevator path available for it. Muscling something that heavy down a staircase is how people and property get hurt, so the crew used the right tool for the scenario instead.
Ontrack Moving keeps specialized equipment on hand for exactly these situations. A motorized stair-climbing dolly let the crew walk the heavy machinery down two flights of stairs in a controlled, mechanically supported descent and load it straight into storage. Matching the equipment to the specific commercial scenario is part of planning the job, not something to improvise on move day.
On an executive relocation, leadership and key functions get back to work first. The CEO and executives were moved as the priority into the temporary space by a dedicated team, with their items flagged for priority within the temporary-office stream. The aim was straightforward: get leadership set up and operational quickly in the temporary building so the most critical work continued while the rest of the office transitioned around it.
A renovation does not pause the business. The project was staged across multiple days and areas under a phased-shift approach, so one part of the office could be broken down and cleared while another part stayed in use, and the team moved into the temporary building in a planned sequence rather than all at once. The decommission itself ran across five working days: two days of disposal, two days breaking down the cubicle systems, and a final day to move the retained items into storage. This is the same phased thinking described in our office relocation playbook and the protocol breakdown on the commercial moving hub.
A decommission is only half of a renovation project. The other half comes months later, when the building is ready and everything that was vaulted has to go back in and land in the right rooms. Ontrack Moving® returned this client's retained contents from warehouse storage to the renovated facility in a second phase, running it as two scopes that together brought back fifteen storage vaults, with two trucks assigned to each scope and crews of five and six working across two and three days.
The renovation ran longer than planned, and the retained contents stayed in storage for about ten months. During that stretch the client occasionally needed specific items back before the full return. On one occasion that meant ten particular boxes out of a much larger storage load. Because the retained items had been inventoried into their vaults when they went in, the crew could locate those boxes and pull them for the client, then leave the rest in place for the return.
The same access protocol governed the return. The citizenship requirement did not relax because the building had been renovated, so the crew was staffed to it again in advance: the people permitted inside handled placement, while the rest worked the trucks and the path to the door. The return plan accounted for those access requirements when assigning the work inside and outside the building.
Placement was the work. Returning contents is not a delivery to a loading area; it is putting specific items back into specific rooms across a building with no elevator. A heavy filing cabinet had to travel from the ground floor up to the IT office on the upper floor, which is a planned stair carry with the crew and equipment set for it in advance rather than a surprise discovered at the bottom of a staircase. The heavy machinery that had come down two flights on the motorized stair-climbing dolly went back into its position on the ground floor. That machinery had been taken apart for the move out, and the crew reassembled it in place without a manual to work from. Electronics came out of storage and back to the workstations they belonged to, along with the retained filing cabinets and roughly twenty boxes returned from the temporary office.
The scope also carried after-move support, which on a return project is not a courtesy line. It is the acknowledgment that a company standing its own office back up will find things it wants shifted once people are actually working in the space again, and that the mover who placed everything is the one who should come back and adjust it.
Vault storage kept the retained contents grouped for the return to the renovated building. Planning the return alongside storage helped organize the later placement work. Vault counts are estimated at survey and confirmed by the actual volume loaded.
A decommissioning of this size touches elevators, floors, door frames, loading areas, and shared building space. Ontrack Moving carries a $10,000,000 Combined Protection Tower across separate business policies, each subject to its own terms and limits. Customer goods are addressed separately under the signed moving agreement, including the $0.60 per pound per article provision where elected. Additional valuation protection is available through a third-party provider, subject to its terms.
| Coverage | What it applies to |
|---|---|
| $10M Combined Protection Tower | Combined limits across separate business policies, each subject to its own terms. This is not a single $10M premises policy or protection for the value of customer goods. |
| $0.60/lb cargo liability | The $0.60 per pound per article provision for customer goods, where elected under the signed moving agreement. Additional valuation protection is available through a third-party provider, subject to its terms. |
| FMCSA Company Record | The official FMCSA company snapshot, listed under USDOT #2551548. |
The office was cleared for the renovation under the access protocol throughout, with a U.S.-citizen crew checking in daily and following the facility access procedure. The majority of the contents were disposed of and recycled where possible, the retained items went into Ontrack Moving® secured storage, and the working team was relocated to the temporary building with leadership prioritized so the most critical functions came back online quickly.
The renovation has since finished and the second phase is complete. Fifteen storage vaults came back out of the warehouse and into the finished building across two scopes, under the same citizenship protocol that governed the decommission, with placement handled room by room rather than dropped at a loading area. The project ran as one continuous piece of work with a long pause in the middle, which is what a renovation move actually is.
It is the kind of project that shows what an asset-based carrier is for: a job that several other companies could not staff, run by an in-house crew working to the facility access requirements with the equipment and phased plan for the job. If your organization is planning a renovation move, a secure-facility relocation, or an office decommissioning, our commercial moving team can scope it with an on-site survey.
Office relocations, decommissioning, and secure-facility moves across the Bay Area, run by our own in-house crews. Asset-based direct carrier under USDOT #2551548. $10M Combined Protection Tower across separate business policies.
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