Office Cleanout Los Angeles

What office cleanouts look like on the Westside

The typical call is a small firm whose lease is up at the end of the month: a suite along Olympic Boulevard or Bundy Drive in West LA, an upstairs office over a storefront on Main Street in Santa Monica, or a converted bungalow near the studios in Culver City. Inside there are eight to twenty workstations, a conference table nobody wants to carry, two or three lateral filing cabinets, a printer the size of a dishwasher, and a breakroom with a fridge and microwave that stayed behind when the last tenant left too.

The bigger version is a Century City (90067) suite being stripped back for the next tenant's build-out, or a campus east of Sepulveda in El Segundo with a loading dock and a security desk. Those multi-day, multi-truck jobs live on our commercial junk removal page. This page is for the single suite that has to be empty by Friday.

How an office cleanout works

Text a photo of each room, plus one of the elevator or dock if the building has one, to (310) 905-5138. Miles quotes the whole suite as one number by truck space; the carry, the panel teardown and the e-waste routing are in it. Before we arrive, pull the files that are going to your shredder, unplug and label anything you're keeping, and clear personal items off the desks. You don't need to take anything apart.

We send two or three people with cubicle connector tools, hand trucks, floor runners and corner guards for the hallway. Panel systems come down into worksurfaces, panels and legs so they stack flat in the truck. Monitors get boxed, cables get coiled, and filing cabinets get emptied into bins if they're still full. A ten-desk suite usually takes two to three hours; a full floor takes a day. We prefer late afternoons and Saturdays for occupied buildings so the neighbors aren't stepping over desks in the corridor, and we send a certificate of insurance to management the day before.

Load sizes for an office cleanout

Paper is the thing that moves an office quote. A lateral file full of folders is heavy, so empty the cabinets you can, or tell us how many are still full and we'll plan the crew for it.

Where it goes

Height-adjustable desks, task chairs with intact mechanisms, bookcases, conference tables and whiteboards go to Goodwill Southern California or The Salvation Army on the way out of the job. Cubicle panel systems rarely have a second home, so the steel frames and legs go to a scrap recycler and the fabric panels go to the transfer station.

Monitors, towers, printers, phones and the box of cabling are boxed and kept off the landfill load for an e-waste recycler; details are on our e-waste removal page. Hard drives are your call: pull them before we arrive, or we can bring a shredding and data-destruction partner for both the drives and the paper. The breakroom fridge goes the appliance route for refrigerant recovery. What's left goes to Southern California Disposal on Frank Street in Santa Monica for Westside suites, the Culver City Transfer and Recycling Station on Jefferson Boulevard for Culver City and Playa Vista, or the Gardena transfer station on Rosecrans Avenue for El Segundo and the South Bay.

Access situations we plan for

• Towers: Century City, the Wilshire corridor and the Ocean Avenue buildings in Santa Monica have freight elevators that must be reserved and docks with set hours. Send us the building's move-out rules and we schedule inside them.
• Parking structures: Downtown Santa Monica structures have clearance bars the truck won't fit under, so we stage at the dock or a loading zone and carry.
• Campuses: El Segundo and Playa Vista offices usually need a vendor check-in at security and sometimes badges for the crew. Add us to the visitor list the day before.
• Strip-mall suites: Pico, Washington and Sepulveda storefront offices have one front door and a shared lot. We work early or after closing so we don't block your neighbors' customers.
• Studio lots: Culver City production offices require gate check-in and often a drive-on pass; tell us which gate.

When the city will take it, and when it won't

Mostly it won't. The free bulky-item pickups on this site's location pages are residential programs. LA Sanitation's 311 pickup serves homes and apartment buildings, and a business in LA City is served by a commercial franchise hauler, so desks and cubicles are a question for that account. Culver City's bulky program states outright that it does not accept commercial waste. Santa Monica's three-a-year program and El Segundo's EDCO allowance are written for single-family and duplex residents, so an office suite falls outside them.

That leaves two realistic options: ask your building's hauler for a scheduled bulky pickup or a temporary bin, which you and your staff fill yourselves at the dock, or have a crew carry it out of the suite and route the usable pieces to donation. The exception is the home office. If you're a sole proprietor working out of a house in Mar Vista or Westchester, LASAN's residential pickup will take the desk from the curb like any other bulky item.

Lease-end timing

Office leases on the Westside tend to end on the last day of a month or a quarter, and the landlord's walk-through is usually the morning after. Book a week ahead for a fixed date and we hold the window, including a Saturday if the building allows weekend moves. If your date lands at the end of a quarter, text early.