Building a Modular Wooden Rack for My Homelab

Overview

Over the past year, my homelab expanded into a sprawling footprint on the room floor: two Proxmox VE hypervisor nodes (pve2 in a custom Micro-ATX tower and pve3 in an HP ProDesk microtower), an Imelsan C1KS 1 kVA Online UPS, an external VRLA battery bank, a Wi-Fi router, and an 8-port gigabit switch.

Left sitting directly on the carpet, the setup had three annoying issues:

1. Wasted Floor Space: The equipment and loose loops of cabling sprawled across nearly 1.5 m² of floor area.
2. Dust and Thermals: Carpet fibers trapped dust right at the tower power supply and bottom air intakes, restricting airflow.
3. Cable Rats Nest: Power cords, battery leads, and Cat6 patch cables intertwined into a messy tangle that made swapping hardware or tracing a port frustrating.

Commercial 19-inch server cabinets were completely impractical here—they are expensive, overly deep, loud, and painful to haul up stairs. Instead of buying new lumber or hardware, I set out to build something at absolute minimum cost—and managed to finish it at literally zero expense—by repurposing surplus furniture boards and scrap wood offcuts gathering dust in the back of my workshop. The result is an open-air vertical rack tailored to these exact machines: it stacks everything upright with a tiny footprint, hides cabling cleanly behind the frame, and keeps all four sides open for ventilation.

TL;DR: Check the 3D Server Shelf

Before cutting any wood, I built a 1:1 Three.js 3D simulator to test dimensions, verify chassis spacing, check screw placements, and visualize thermal airflow paths.

You can inspect the entire design in a dedicated interactive viewer:

Hardware Layout: Three Vertical Tiers

To keep the tower stable without anchoring it to a wall, I divided the physical hardware into three vertical tiers based on weight, thermals, and cabling:

Lower Tier: Power and Ballast

• Hardware: 1 kVA Online UPS and external VRLA battery block.
• Function: Weighing roughly 15 kg combined, placing the power gear on the lowest level locks the center of gravity straight to the floor, making the entire frame rock-solid against accidental bumps. The open rear allows the UPS high-RPM exhaust fan to blow heated air outward without obstruction.

Middle Tier: Compute Nodes

• Hardware: pve2 custom Micro-ATX tower and pve3 HP ProDesk microtower.
• Function: Both hypervisors sit side-by-side on the middle shelf. Keeping a 10.5 cm air corridor between the metal chassis ensures their intake fans draw fresh room air rather than recycling heat from the adjacent server.

Top Tier: Networking

• Hardware: TP-Link Wi-Fi router and Mercusys 8-port gigabit switch.
• Function: Elevating the router antennas above the metal server towers eliminates RF signal shielding and ensures omnidirectional wireless coverage. Ethernet patch cables drop straight down the back of the frame to the compute tier.

Cable Routing and Airflow

A major advantage of building a custom frame is designing the cable runs directly into the structure:

• AC and Data Segregation: All high-voltage AC wiring (mains input, PDU cords, battery connections) runs along the left rear upright. All low-voltage Cat6 network drops run along the opposite right rear upright. This physical 45 cm air gap eliminates electromagnetic induction into unshielded network cables.
• Hidden Rear Cabling: Looking at the rack from the front, all cabling is tucked neatly behind the wooden uprights and shelves, while remaining completely accessible from the rear for quick patch changes.
• Convective Cooling: Lifting the compute nodes ~50 cm above floor level freed them from carpet dust. With completely open front, side, and rear faces, convective airflow improved enough that idle CPU temperatures on both Proxmox nodes dropped by 4–5°C.

Modular, Flat-Pack Assembly

I avoided using wood glue or permanent dowels for one reason: relocatability.

• Gravity-Seated Shelves: The lower and middle shelves are not screwed down. They rest securely on the horizontal side rails under their own weight, captured laterally between the vertical legs and rear crossbars. Removing a shelf for a chassis overhaul or deep cleaning requires zero tools.
• Flat-Pack in Minutes: The entire frame is assembled using basic wood screws driven through pre-drilled pilot holes. Backing out the screws reduces the whole rack into a flat stack of boards in under 10 minutes, making it easy to throw in a car trunk if I ever move.

The Outcome

Moving the homelab off the carpet into this vertical rack solved every issue I had with the previous setup:

• Footprint: The floor footprint dropped from ~1.5 m² of sprawling equipment down to just 0.22 m² (49 x 45 cm).
• Maintenance: Cleaning the floor around the servers no longer requires navigating a minefield of cables, and swapping a network patch cable takes seconds.
• Zero Cost: The whole build was completed entirely from scrap wood and assorted screws on hand, without spending a dime on commercial rack cabinets.