A two-floor office, a strict federal 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 August 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 stayed closed at all times. 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 stayed closed at all times, so the team coordinated that one badge to open and close on every pass in and out with loaded equipment. On a multi-day decommissioning, that kind of controlled access only works with a steady, vetted crew that knows the routine.
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. That structure is what let Ontrack confirm citizenship status across the roster and assign a vetted team that met the facility requirement for the full duration of the project, with the same familiar crew returning each day.
It is the same reason building managers ask for asset-based carriers on high-security and Class-A jobs. 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 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 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. Staffing to that split a second time was straightforward precisely because the roster had already been confirmed for phase one, which is one of the quieter advantages of keeping both halves of a project with the same carrier.
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. 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.
Contents bound for a return are loaded into sealed vaults once and then left alone until the building is ready. On a job that is going to be reversed, every extra handling of a vault while it waits is a risk with no upside, so the value is in what does not happen during the storage period rather than in anything visible on move day. 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 carried its $10,000,000 Combined Protection Tower for building liability across the project, which is what covers the premises and structures the crew works in and around. Customer goods themselves are covered separately under standard $0.60 per pound per article cargo liability per federal FMCSA rules, with additional valuation protection available for purchase.
| Coverage | What it applies to |
|---|---|
| $10M Combined Protection Tower | Buildings, premises, floors, elevators, and shared building areas; general liability and workers compensation for the work performed. |
| $0.60/lb cargo liability | The furniture, equipment, and items themselves, per article, under the federal FMCSA minimum. Additional valuation protection available for purchase. |
| DOT Inspection Record Exceeding the National Average | The federal safety record under FMCSA inspection, verifiable under USDOT #2551548. |
The office was cleared for the renovation under the access protocol throughout, with a U.S.-citizen crew badging in daily and the building kept secure. 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 a vetted in-house crew with the right equipment and a phased plan. 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 for building liability.
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