We're moving. Not far, but far enough that everything has to go in boxes, and that includes the corner of the spare room that has quietly become a homelab. There is something humbling about labelling a box "SERVERS (FRAGILE)" in marker pen and watching a removal chap stack it next to the saucepans.
The one decision I'm glad of is that I photographed the back of the rack before unplugging a single cable. Every port, every label, the whole spaghetti, in focus, on my phone. Past versions of me would have confidently remembered which cable went where and been wrong by Tuesday.
Everything else is just boxes and tape and the dawning realisation of how much stuff accumulates when nobody's watching. There are cables I cannot account for and a small switch I genuinely do not remember buying. The lab goes in the van last and comes out first, on the theory that a house without a kettle is survivable but a house without DNS is not. I'll let you guess which of those two opinions my partner shares.
I'll write up the actual rebuild once it's done and I've stopped finding power bricks in odd boxes. For now, the photos are taken, the marker pen has done its work, and somewhere in a stack labelled FRAGILE sits the small empire that runs my house.