The house I’ve been living in for the last 5 years hasn’t been my own. My wife, daughter and I have been living with my in-laws. But that is all changing!!
Later this month, we close on our new home. While it’s not “new”, it’s perfect for us. Built in 1998, there is zero technology in the home, which is something I hope to change.
The garage has ample space which means I could build a network “room” of sorts, which will contain all of the home networking and automation stuff. This way, it is separate from the rest of the garage.
I’ll need to establish a few key pieces though:
- This is a two story house, and I will need to determine a way to get ethernet into each room of the house from the garage.
- There is currently telephone line run into a few rooms, which I will be swapping over to ethernet. Need to figure out where those lead to.
- Over the years, multiple COAX lines have been run on the exterior of the house, this could be an easy route to get ethernet in, the COAX is fairly ugly on the house, being all black and the house being lighter in color. Pulling it all out and replacing it with lighter color CAT-6 cable will not only be less of an eye sore, but also will solve the “how to get ethernet in each room” issue.
Because we won’t have Cable TV, we’re going to run ethernet to each room for a couple of reasons, the first being that having wired devices in each room beats the hell out trusting wireless for everything. Second, traditional Cable TV is quickly becoming outdated with the existence of streaming services.
I think I’ll take a few ideas from Quinn of SnazzyLabs and go with Lutron Caseta for our lights. The idea of having smart lights that don’t require WiFi is pretty awesome. Plus that whole, people flip switches and cause the lights to go crazy.
I’ll update further as the process continues. I will hopefully be doing a few videos of the process. In the mean time, check out Quinn’s video here:
Dan Walker 