We're moving house, and it turns out a homelab is the one possession that judges you for owning it. Everything else packs into a box. The rack packs into a box too, technically, but only after you've spent an evening unpicking the cable management you were so proud of and discovering you have no idea which patch lead goes where once they're all coiled in a bin bag together.
The thing I got right, and I say this as advice to past me who absolutely would not have bothered, was labelling. Every cable got a strip of tape and a scrawled note at both ends before anything came out of the rack. Every drive got bagged with the host it belongs to. I photographed the back of the rack before touching it, which took thirty seconds and saved me an hour of "now which port was the WAN".
The thing I got wrong was assuming I'd have internet on day one in the new place. The ISP, predictably, did not share my optimism. So the lab sits in boxes in the spare room, the family makes do with mobile data, and I've made my peace with a few days of downtime that nobody but me will notice.
Funny how the loud, complicated bit was the easy part. The rack will go back up in an afternoon. It's the box of unlabelled bits that haunts me, the one marked "misc cables", which is a lie I tell myself every single move.