Overview
There is something satisfying about building infrastructure from scratch, not because the process is always smooth, but because every decision leaves a visible trace in the final result. This post documents the current state of my home lab, a two-host architecture that separates dedicated NAS duties from a virtualization platform. It covers the hardware inventory, how services are distributed across the two hosts, the decision forks I worked through during the build, and the real-world market pressures that shaped what I actually purchased versus what I originally planned.