Half the people we deliver totes to in Ventura County work from home, and almost all of them ask the same question: how long will I be offline? With a little sequencing, the answer is usually "a few hours," not "a week."
Start with the internet, not the desk
Call your provider two to three weeks out and schedule install at the new address for the day before your move, not the day after. Frontier, Spectrum, and AT&T all serve pockets of the county differently — the plan you have in Camarillo may not exist in Simi Valley. Have a hotspot plan as backup either way.
Photograph every cable before you unplug it
Take a photo of the back of your desk, your monitor arms, and your router. That one minute saves forty on the other end. Then coil each cable, band it, and drop the whole bundle into one tote labeled "OFFICE — FIRST." Don't scatter cables across three totes.
- Monitors: screen-to-screen with a towel or moving blanket between, standing upright, never flat.
- Desktop tower: upright in its own tote, padded with soft goods. Pull the GPU if it's a heavy one.
- Laptop, drives, passport, contracts: these ride in your car, not the truck.
- Paper files: hanging folders drop straight into a tote in order. This is where totes beat cardboard outright — no sag, no tape, and the lid snaps shut.
The "day one" tote
Pack one tote that gets you working: laptop charger, monitor, one cable bundle, mouse, headset, power strip, and a folding chair if your real chair is on the truck. Load it last so it comes off first. Our totes hold up to 65 lbs, so that whole kit fits in one.
Back up before you unplug
Drives get dropped. Run a full backup to the cloud or an external drive the night before, and keep that external drive in a different vehicle than the computer. Insurance you'll almost certainly never need, and will be very glad for if you do.
Give yourself a real unpacking window
Studio and 1-bedroom rentals run 5 days, 2-bedroom gets a full week, 3-bedroom 7 days, and 4-bedroom 10 days. If your work week eats the middle of the move, extend by the day — $20/day for the first three days, then $12/day, up to 10 extra days — and your pickup date shifts automatically.
The local angle
We're family-owned and we drive the routes ourselves, so we can drop totes early in the week and pick up after your deadline instead of in the middle of it. Free delivery and pickup in Thousand Oaks, Ventura, Oxnard, Camarillo, Simi Valley, Moorpark, and Santa Paula. Packages start at $119 — see pricing — and the moving checklist covers everything outside the office. Moving a whole company instead? Read our office move guide or call (805) 273-8732.