Paul’s Tech Makeover: Some Closure At Last (Premium)

In the past week, a few unrelated events have brought some closure to what I will call the first phase of our personal tech makeover in Pennsylvania.

As I assume the entire planet knows by now, we bought a family home in Pennsylvania and moved here in August. Since then, we've been busy renovating the house and emptying our savings account in the process. Why didn't anyone tell us that this would be so expensive?

Kidding. But the relevant part of this story for Thurrott.com readers is that I've used this move to rethink the personal technologies we use at home, and have begun using, for the first time, some smart home solutions.

And it's been going ... OK. As I've described in previous articles in this series.

But, as noted, this past week has been kind of interesting in that a number of outstanding issues from the past have either been resolved or soon will be. And it occurred to me that I could provide a little update to each.
Electrical
First, the electrical. Most of the money we put aside for the renovations ended up in the hands of my new electrician. And while my wife is still pretty upset about this, we did at least accomplish what I had wanted. Which was to completely overhaul the electrical in the house, replace and all the dated light switches and power receptacles, and dramatically reduce the number of those switches, plus remove all of the phone jacks and almost all of the cable TV coaxial jacks.

It was a lot of work. And while it's not technically done yet, the hard stuff---redoing the light switches so that they are all new and consistent, and reducing the number of them---is done. Back in August, I wrote about this work, and then about a month later I provided an update where you can see all the holes in the walls from the switch removals.

So this week, the house is getting painted. And while that isn't particularly interesting from a tech perspective (or otherwise, really), this work does close the loop on that switch/ receptacle work. Because it is the painters who filled and patched all those holes we made earlier. And while I was nervous about this initially, thinking that maybe we'd always be able to see the outlines of the holes, it came out pretty great. And it only took two months. Cough.

Smart lights
Figuring out a smart approach to smart lights was also part of our electrical budget. I knew going into this that there were various approaches---smart lights with dumb switches vs. smart switches with dumb lights being one of the more obvious debates---but I figured we'd start small, and we did.

As of now, we've got Philips Hue smart lights behind the TV in the living room, and in my daughter's room, and we'll be adding some ambient lights in the sun room as soon as they arrive.

In the kitchen, we added light strips above and below the cabinets, though they are not Philips parts. I think that will do it for now, though I may try smart lights when my new podcast studio gets built once...