The spare room had become untenable. Two tower servers, a switch balanced on a stack of paperback books, and a UPS that sang a single sad note whenever the kettle and the microwave went on together. So the kit moved to the garage, into a proper 24U rack I picked up second-hand from a company that was clearing out a comms room.
The rack itself was the easy part. The hard part was everything around it. The garage is uninsulated, which is wonderful in March and a problem in July. I now have a temperature sensor reporting back to the house, and a plan I have not yet built that involves a thermostatically controlled extractor fan. The noise, which was a genuine marital issue indoors, is now somebody else's problem, mostly the spiders'.
Would I do it again? Yes, but I would run the network first. I trenched a single Cat6 run out to the garage in the rain, having not measured properly, and came up short by about a metre. The join I made to fix that is the sort of thing I will eventually have to confess to. For now it works, the rack hums away to itself, and the spare room is a spare room again. Small victories.