Monument

I have the forgetting kind of ADHD, so I straight up don’t know what I do and don’t have. This could be handy in that regard.
But I also can’t really see myself using this because the debt of keeping it current would be a nightmare.

Well, I thought my misinformation was funny.

It’s to check to see if commenters know how to escape the symbol. Congratulations! You passed!

Source: I made it up.

I just bought a Mac mini for $50 from a local university’s surplus store. I plan to use it as spare hdd space for another device (it came with a 1tb drive), but even being older, it’s still very capable.
Perhaps a similar device could work for you?

So I recently(ish) went through this - migrating from consumer hardware to rolling my own.
Here’s what I did:

I bought a mini-PC router and loaded OPNsense onto it.
I needed wireless AP’s in some odd places, so I bought a pair of POE-powered Netgear WAX620 AP’s because they were a decent price, and a 2.5G POE+ Switch.
I probably would not go with Netgear again. They try to lock you into their cloud (subscription) platform. I don’t dig it. I would probably also not go with a POE switch unless I had to, because it adds a lot to the cost.
If I had planned better, I’d have waited until a decent older switch became available from a local surplus source. (The local university has a public surplus site that sometimes has interesting and cheap networking gear.)
If you plan to set up VLANs, make sure your switches are up to the task.