Floor restack
A restack is a logistics problem wearing an IT costume. The technical work — unplug, move, plug in — is the easy part; what decides whether the floor opens is the seating map, the labelling scheme, the freight booking, and knowing which twelve people cannot be down for an hour. This is the sequence we run, written from phased moves of four to two hundred users.
Doing it
The order the work actually happens in, from the audit that stops surprises to the floor walk that catches the tail.
- Label printer
- Anti-static bags or crates
- Cordless driver
- Trolley or dolly
- Numbered labels
- Cable ties or hook-and-loop
- Bin bags for waste
- 01
Audit the origin floor before anything is promised
Walk every desk and record what is actually there: machine type, monitor count and mounts, docks, phones, and anything personal that will need moving. The asset register will be wrong. Photograph anything unusual — a triple-monitor arm, a scanner, a dedicated line — because those are the seats that will hold up the whole floor if they are discovered on the night.
CautionIdentify the seats that cannot go down at all — trading desks, dispatch, anyone on a regulated line — on day one, not on the night.
- 02
Get the seating map signed off, then freeze it
The map changes until somebody decides it will not. Agree a freeze date with the person who owns the floor, and treat changes after it as a separate visit. A move plan built against a map that is still moving produces boxes on the wrong desks.
- 03
Label to the destination, not the origin
Every machine, monitor, dock, and cable gets a label naming the seat it is going to. A crate marked with where it came from is useless to whoever unpacks it. Number the destination seats on the map and put the same number on the equipment and on the desk.
- 04
Book the building before the people
Freight elevator windows, dock time, COI filing, and after-hours access all have lead times and they are the constraint. Confirm them in writing, and confirm what happens if the work runs past the window — a floor half-moved with no lift access at 6am is the failure mode that costs a second weekend.
CautionMost buildings want a certificate of insurance days ahead of a dock booking. File it early; it is the cheapest thing on the critical path.
- 05
Break down in a fixed order and keep sets together
Work desk by desk rather than by equipment type. Everything from one seat travels together, labelled, with its cables — the alternative is a floor of unmatched docks and power supplies and an afternoon spent pairing them. Bag small parts and tape them to the machine.
- 06
Rebuild, then test every seat individually
Rebuild to the map, then sit at each seat and confirm it: machine boots, network is live, phone registers, monitors are on the right arms at the right height. A floor that looks finished and has not been tested seat by seat is a floor that is not finished.
CautionTest the network at the desk, not at the patch panel. A live port and a dead outlet look identical from the closet.
- 07
Reconcile assets and route the surplus
Count what arrived against what left. Anything not going back on a desk — decommissioned machines, dead monitors, the drawer of unlabelled cables — goes to storage against a tracked manifest or to disposal with a chain of custody. Surplus that is not routed on the night becomes a pile somebody inherits.
- 08
Walk the floor on day one
Be there when people sit down. Every restack produces a tail of small problems — a monitor at the wrong height, a missing dock, someone whose profile did not follow — and fixing them within the first hour is the difference between a move people remember as smooth and one they do not.
- How long does a floor take?
- It scales with seats and crew, not with floors. As a planning figure, a small crew handles a few dozen seats in an overnight window; a couple of hundred is a multi-day phased job, not one heroic night. The constraints that actually set the schedule are freight access and how many people can work the floor at once.
- Should we move over a weekend or in phases?
- Phases, whenever the building allows it. A phased restack lets you carry lessons from the first group into the next and keeps the blast radius small if something goes wrong. A single weekend is right when the floor is small enough to finish comfortably inside the window, with room to spare for surprises.
- What gets forgotten most often?
- Anything that is not a computer. Desk phones and their extensions, label printers, scanners, signature pads, the conference room, the machine under the desk nobody claims that turns out to run something. The pre-move audit exists to find exactly these.
- Who should be on site on Monday?
- Whoever did the work. Day-one support by someone who was there overnight resolves in minutes what a fresh helpdesk ticket takes hours to understand, because they already know what moved and what was left.
The rest of the section
- 01RJ45 Wiring: T568A and T568BBoth colour codes, pin by pin, side by side.
- 02RJ11 Wiring and Phone PinoutsSix positions, three lines, two colour systems.
- 03Keystone Jack TerminationStrip, seat, punch, snap — without failing the certification.
- 0466 Block WiringFifty rows, four columns, and where the bridging clips go.
- 05110 Block WiringLay the pairs in, press the connecting block on.
- 06Cat5e vs Cat6 vs Cat6a vs Cat8Speed, distance, and power decide it — not the bigger number.
- 07Fibre Types, Connectors and PolishRead the jacket, read the connector, don't mate blue to green.
- 08Subnetting, ExplainedWhere the numbers come from, and the meaning behind them.
- 09PoE Standards and Why It Won't PowerThe switch reserves the class, not the draw.
- 10Camera Lens, Field of View and Pixel DensityCovering the room is not the same as identifying a face in it.
- 11Patch Panels and Labelling to TIA-606A label that survives is worth more than a tidy rack.
- 12Rack Planning: Units, Depth, Weight and HeatIt fits vertically. That was never the hard part.
- 13Writing a Switch ConfigurationFrom factory default to a switch you would hand over.
- 14Networking and Cabling GlossaryThe terms, and what they mean on a job.
- 15POTS to VoIP: What BreaksThe lines nobody remembers until they stop working.
- 16Testing an Analogue Phone LineTip, ring, and the four numbers that tell you whose fault it is.
- 17Toning and Tracing a CableFinding one pair in a bundle of two hundred.
- 18Reading a Cable Certifier ReportWhat PASS* actually means, and which number to look at first.
- 19Which Cable Tester Do You Need?Three tiers, and the one most people actually need.
- 20Cable Management for Desks and RacksTidy is a by-product. Serviceable is the point.
- 21Asset Tagging and CMDB AuditsThe scan is easy. Scanning it into the right record is the job.
- 22Cabling an Office Fit-OutHow many drops, run where, and what it takes to add one later.
- 23Parcel Locker Site SurveysWhether the unit fits, powers, connects — and gets in the door.
- 24VLANs and TrunkingAccess, trunk, tagged, native — and which one is the security hole.
- 25Spanning Tree and Switching LoopsWhy one patch cord can take a whole floor down in seconds.
- 26Reading a TracerouteWhich loss is real, and whose network it is in.
- 27DHCP, DNS and Helper AddressesWhy the new VLAN gets no addresses, and why it is always DNS.
- 28Wi-Fi Channel Planning and AP PlacementMore access points at lower power, not fewer at maximum.
- 29SMART Attributes That Predict FailureA drive can report PASSED while it is visibly dying.
- 30BitLocker: Keys, Recovery and EscrowThe key exists somewhere, or the data does not.
- 31Grounding and Bonding a Telecom RoomOne ground, one path, and no loops between rooms.
- 32UPS Sizing: VA, Watts and RuntimeThe number on the box is not the number you need.
- 33Mounting Displays on Any WallFind the structure. Everything else is a repair bill.
- 34Mounting IP CamerasHeight, angle, and the surfaces that ruin the picture at night.
We do this work
as well as document it
Anyone with a floor date, a seating plan that changed twice, and a building that only allows freight before 7am.