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Notes -
I got a new house. It's significantly bigger than my last house. I think I'm looking at like 5-10 hours of home network engineering to get it put together. Please critique my stack.
The house has existing coax cable runs to various rooms, which must go. I'm thinking of taping cat6 cable to the coax terminals and pulling them to try to re-run those paths as cat6. This way the coax jacks are replaced with Ethernet jacks. Avoids drilling new holes. Have them all terminate at the switch in the garage. Can put either full desktops or APs on the ends.
I'm planning on 2 vlans. One for the humans and home services. The other vlan for cloud-IoT shit that can only access the Internet and not even cross talk to each other.
I will give caution that I've had some mixed results from TP-Link. The worst problems have involved their routers, which you're skipping, but their access points and especially management were pretty flaky the last time I tried them (admittedly, 2023), especially with mesh mode problems or multiple wifi network configurations. Doesn't matter a ton for the switch, but you may want to consider stepping up to UniFi.
((Or if you have concerns about China... uh, gfl.))
Get a bigger switch than you think you need. You're looking at one port for the router, three ports for the access point, one for the dedicated home server... and that just leaves three for end users. That's probably enough right now, if you don't do a lot of high-quality media streaming to televisions or want dedicated lines for a desktop computer, but it's not a lot of excess. Especially if you might want a security camera system or have a lot of PC gamers, those three remaining slots can fill up faster than you'd expect, and WiFi that works fine today might struggle when a couple more devices are all stomping the same SSIDs.
Get a box (with a fan) for the switch if you're putting it in the garage, or keep it in the house. You would be amazed how quickly these electronics pick up dust, mouse crap, sawdust, dead leaves, and insects. I'd favor keeping as much electronic equipment inside the house's vapor barrier as possible.
When you pull the coax, both tape (ideally gaffer, if not duct) and tie a good series of knots, and pull a poly line with the cat6. If you're dealing with conduit, I'd argue just pulling a poly-line run alone first, but for normal residential you shouldn't see conduit for coax.
Consider a small APC for the router, switch, and server. Less because of the uptime -- you're buying maybe 15 minutes for any not-ridiculous APC -- and more for the device protection. Voltage transients in particular are murder on single-power-supply servers, and it's as often the mainboard that dies as the psu.
I set up UniFi stuff for my brother's company but the APs weren't very reliable either, though the shininess of the rest of their stack was pretty nice. I'm mostly just going to edit iptables rules by hand like a neckbeard though.
I have a few recommendations for the Omada\ APs today in 2026 so I'll take a risk with them. I would probably just disable any smart stuff they try to do and manually set their power and see if it'll let me get away with it.
A box with a fan is a solid idea. Ditto for the UPS.
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