The Home Lab Challenge is back, and this time I’ve only got two weeks and a $700 total budget ($500 base plus $200 from Server Part Deals) to build what I’d actually call a solid, beginner-realistic homelab. I’m going head-to-head with Brett (Radal), we’ve got some simplified rules (no flipping, no recycling-center shenanigans), and at the end Jeff Geerling is judging the builds. I also picked an old OpenWrt router as my “starting item” because I wanted to knock out routing/Wi‑Fi immediately and spend the rest of the budget where it matters. In Part 1, I start with storage and grab two 12TB HGST Ultrastar drives from Server Part Deals, then hunt down a cheap NAS host that can actually hold multiple drives. The big win was a $60 Dell Precision-style box that turned out to be an i3-9100 with 16GB DDR4, three drive bays, and a super low 10–11W idle in Linux Mint. From there, I plan a second compute box around a Ryzen 5 5300G for efficiency (monolithic APU, integrated graphics, “good enough” horsepower), then I realize I messed up my spreadsheet and I’m $94 over budget… after I already started buying stuff. So I re-plan hard: cheaper 10G switching, bargain NICs, and some jank (including a boot device that didn’t work) to get TrueNAS Scale up and running anyway.