The homelab used to live on a wire shelf in the spare room, which is to say it lived on top of a slow-motion argument with my wife about noise, heat, and the cable that ran across the doorway. So over the Christmas break I bought a second-hand 24U rack off a local listing for less than the price of a single new switch, talked a friend into helping me lift it, and put the whole lot in the garage. I am glad I did it. I also have a list.
what went right
The rack itself was the easy win. Everything has a place now, rails take the weight properly, and I can pull a server forward to work on it instead of performing surgery whilst it balances on a shelf edge. Patch panels at the top, a managed switch below, and a 1U shelf for the things that refuse to be rack-mounted no matter how much I wish they would. Cable management arms turned out to be worth every penny of the extra I paid for them.
Moving it to the garage solved the noise problem outright. The spare room is silent again. The fans can scream all they like out there and nobody downstairs hears a thing.
what i did not think about
The garage is cold and damp, which is fine for the kit and less fine for everything else. In January it sat around 4°C out there, and the first thing that happened was condensation on the cold metal when I opened the door on a milder morning. I now have a cheap hygrometer logging to the lab and a small heater on a thermostat keeping it above the dew point. That was not in the budget.
Power was the other one. The garage had a single ring main meant for a lawnmower and a drill, not a 24/7 draw. I measured it before I trusted it:
# rough running draw at the wall, via a cheap energy monitor plug
idle: ~180W
under load: ~340W
That is fine for the circuit, but it is also a number that turns up on the electricity bill every month, and the bill in early 2023 is not a forgiving place to be discovering new continuous loads. I have since been ruthless about powering down the things that do not need to be on overnight.
And the walk. The garage is a thirty-second trip across a cold yard, which sounds like nothing until it is eleven at night, it is raining, and something has fallen over and needs a console cable. I have remote management on everything that supports it now, IPMI where I can get it, a serial console server for the rest, because the romance of "going out to the rack" wears off on about the third soggy evening.
would i do it again
Yes, without hesitation, but I would plan the boring bits first. The rack and the servers were the fun part and they were never the problem. The problem was environment: heat, damp, power, and access. If you are thinking about moving a lab into a garage or a loft, sort those four out on paper before you lift a single U of kit, because they are the things that turn a good weekend project into a slow trickle of weekday annoyances.
It is quiet in the house now, though. That alone was worth the regrets.