We moved house this month. Most people moving house worry about the sofa, the fragile boxes, and whether the kettle will be findable on the first night. I worried about all of that too, and also about a small pile of servers, switches and disks that quietly run a chunk of my domestic life and were about to be unplugged, boxed, driven across the country, and asked to come back to life in a different cupboard.
The first thing I learned is that a homelab is heavier than it looks and more tangled than you remember. It accretes. You add a Pi here, a NAS there, a switch because the old one ran out of ports, and at no point do you take a clean photograph of the whole thing. So when it comes time to move it, you are reverse-engineering your own past decisions with a torch and a growing sense of regret.
I did one thing right this time that I had never bothered with before: I labelled every cable at both ends before I unplugged anything, and I photographed the back of the rack from three angles first. It sounds obvious. It is obvious. I had simply never done it, on the theory that I would remember, and I never remembered. With labels, reassembly at the other end was almost dull. Plug the cable marked "NAS-2" into the port marked "NAS-2," repeat, done. Without them, last time, it was an evening of guesswork and a service that refused to come back because I had crossed two VLANs.
The other thing worth saying is about expectations, mine and other people's. There is a window during a house move when nothing in the house works, and for most families that window is "the telly isn't plugged in yet." For a household that depends on a homelab, that window is wider and stranger: no local DNS, no shared files, no home automation, the heating controls suddenly dumb. I made a point of warning everyone that this would happen and roughly how long it would last, because a known outage is an inconvenience and a surprise outage is an argument.
Bringing it back up, I resisted the urge to do everything at once. Power and network first. Then the NAS, because everything else expects it to exist. Then DNS, because everything else expects to be able to find things. Then, and only then, the fun stuff. Booting the whole pile simultaneously and watching it fail in a dozen interdependent ways is a rite of passage I have now done enough times to skip.
It all came back. It took an evening longer than I had hoped, which is the universal constant of house moves and homelabs alike. But it came back, the labels paid for themselves many times over, and the cupboard in the new place is, I am quietly pleased to report, slightly bigger. That last detail is dangerous and I am choosing not to think about it.