Although it is much more common with industrial rather than office premises, sometimes we may need to call upon the services of a professional fitter to assist with your removal.
In fact, more correctly, we may need help from a de-fitter!
Why?
In many industrial premises, health and safety requirements demand that certain types of machinery or other objects are virtually permanently fixed to the floor or the surrounding walls. That’s usually because if you have say a two-tonne press, you don’t want it vibrating and moving around the floor as you use it.
What is perhaps less obvious is that sometimes in standard commercial and even office premises, similar logic has been applied in the past. For example, if you have an older-style office with tall racking for lots of paper file storage, there’s a fair chance that it will be fixed into the walls or the floor (or both) to reduce the risks of it toppling over.
The same can also be true in shops where shop fittings are designed to be “public-proof” in the sense of stopping potential shoppers injuring themselves as pieces of furniture or other fittings come down on top of them.
In the vast majority of cases, such fittings are simple and straightforward. That means the guys in our team can usually remove them easily with a screwdriver or spanner etc.
In passing, don’t forget during office removals, Christchurch or anywhere else in New Zealand, that things that are semi-permanently fixed to the floor and walls may need to be left behind. That’s because, depending upon your exact leasing or sale agreements, they may be legally considered to be part of the structure of the property – even if they were purchased and installed by you to begin with.
If you have any doubts in that area, your solicitor should be able to advise.
Getting back to the main point, sometimes though highly specialized fittings have been used to secure machinery or shelving to the building. There is an almost infinite variety of these but some of them can actually be embedded by cement or other methods into the fabric of the walls.
In those cases, we may need to call upon specialist assistance both to help remove the fixings and to make good any damage that arose as a result.
In fact, such situations are extremely rare and as we said above, normally our guys will be able to cope with a few basic tools.
This is the sort of thing that we will be looking at closely if we conduct a site survey in advance of your removal but it’s always a good idea to bring it explicitly to our attention in advance.