From Trash to Homelab: A Setup That Finally Feels Mine

This is not really a tutorial.

I already wrote about finding the HP EliteDesk in the trash, fixing it with a $25 motherboard, and turning it into a Proxmox server. I also wrote about breaking my CI/CD setup until I found something simpler.

Those posts were about the technical side.

This one is about how good it feels to finally have a setup that feels mine.

For years, I had one simple machine. No real lab. No comfortable workspace. Not even a proper desk where I could sit down and work on things without feeling like I was improvising everything.

I could still code. I could still learn. But everything felt temporary.

Now I have this small homelab, built basically from trash lol, and it works.

The more organized corner of the homelab, with the printer and server stacked together instead of spread across the floor

The printer was a $5 surplus find. The server was sitting outside waiting to be thrown away. None of this started as a clean shopping list. It was more like: can I make this work?

And somehow, yes.

It is not beautiful. There are still cables. There is no rack, no fancy cabinet, no perfect setup. But compared to where I started, this feels huge.

A Place to Build From

The best part is not the hardware. It is the feeling of having a small system I can actually use.

One machine runs services. The other is becoming my backup/storage machine and also my daily development workstation. My desk is where I write code, check Proxmox, test things, and slowly improve the setup.

Desk setup with Proxmox open on one monitor and infrastructure notes on another

Before, every new project came with friction:

Where do I run this?
How do I deploy it?
Where do the files live?
What happens if the machine dies?

Now the answer is simpler: I have a place for it.

Not a perfect place. A real one.

That changes a lot. It makes me want to build more, because the foundation is finally there.

Simple Is Enough

I don’t want this to become a homelab so complicated that I am afraid to touch it.

I want boring pieces I understand: a server for services, a workstation I use every day, backups for the important stuff, and a deployment flow that does not require ten manual steps.

Simple is the feature.

If I have an idea, I can try it. If I want to host something, I have somewhere to put it. If I break something, I can learn from it instead of starting from zero again.

That is worth more to me than having perfect specs or a setup that looks impressive online.

The Real Win

I started with one simple machine and no proper workspace.

Now I have two servers, a desk, a daily workstation, and a small homelab built from hardware people were ready to throw away.

It is not polished. It is not a datacenter.

But it is mine.

And every time I sit down at this desk, it feels like I have a little more room to become the kind of builder I want to be.

That’s the real win.