Packing a home office: back up first, unplug second

Square foot for square foot, the home office is the riskiest room in the house. It holds your most irreplaceable data, your most tangled cables, and the paperwork you absolutely cannot lose—all within arm’s reach of a desk you’ll be using until the day before the move. Pack it with a plan, and in a specific order, and it’s painless. The order is the whole trick.

Back up before you touch anything

Before a single cable comes loose, back up every computer in the room. The standard worth following is two copies in two places: one to a cloud service, one to an external drive. Then actually test it—open a few files from the backup and confirm they’re really there. A backup nobody verified is a hope, not a backup.

The external drive does not go on the truck. It rides in your car, ideally in the same bag as your laptop. And do all of this days before the move, not the morning of—a full backup can take hours, and moving day has no spare hours in it.

Photograph, unplug, bag, and label

Behind every desk is a cable nest that took years to grow. Before you unplug anything, take clear photos of the back of the computer, the monitor connections, and the router setup. Those photos will save you an evening on the other end.

Then unplug one device at a time. Coil its cables, band them, and put them in a zip-top bag labeled for that device—monitor, desktop, router. Tape the bag to the device it belongs to, or collect all the bags in one clearly marked small box. Keep power bricks with their devices; orphaned power supplies are the socks of the office world, and they never come back.

Monitors, computers, and what rides with you

Original boxes with their foam are the best packing there is—if you saved them, use them. Otherwise: wrap a monitor in paper, add a rigid layer over the screen (cardboard cut to size works), then bubble wrap, and pack it upright in a snug box with cushioning below and beside it. Never lay a screen flat and never stack anything on top of one.

A desktop tower gets wrapped and packed upright too, padded so it can’t shift, with the box marked this end up. Laptops, tablets, and that external backup drive don’t get packed at all—they travel with you, full stop.

Printers have two quirks worth knowing: take the ink or toner cartridges out and bag them separately (a cartridge that shifts in transit can leak into the machine), and tape the scanner lid and any paper trays shut so they don’t swing open mid-carry. The printer itself can ride in a padded medium box or simply well-wrapped, upright, on top of the load.

Paper: the heaviest thing in the room

Paper is deceptively heavy, so files go in small boxes only—a small box of paper is already at the edge of comfortable carrying, and a large one is immovable. Keep files upright in their folders so they arrive as files rather than as a deck of shuffled cards.

Some documents shouldn’t ride the truck at all: passports, birth certificates, deeds and titles, tax records, checkbooks, and anything with account numbers. Those belong in your car with you, in one folder or small lockbox you can put your hand on at any moment. Movers decline to carry certain valuables and critical documents anyway—our non-allowables page covers the list. And since you’re touching every file anyway, keep a shredding pile going; there’s no better moment to lighten fifteen years of statements.

Pack a first-day-back box

If you work from home, one box decides how fast you’re operational again: power strip, router and modem, laptop charger, mouse and keyboard, a notepad, and the files for whatever you’re actively working on. Label it OFFICE—OPEN FIRST and make it the last box sealed in the room.

The office is also a room where partial help makes sense—plenty of people pack their own files but hand the electronics to our packing crew, who wrap monitors all the time. Start with a free written estimate and the whole room, cables included, stops being a source of dread.