Smart Home on a Budget

A few years ago I was really interested in the DIY smart home. I attempted to follow some how-to's and use Arduino's and radio signals to make a variety of "smart things" in the home. However, that was not successful.

A year or so later, I attempted to get back into it. I looked into OpenHAB and quickly discovered many people switching to Home Assistant. WHOA, what a difference! With OpenHAB you would have to change at least 3 different files to make something happen and it broke all the time. With Home Assistant - it's largely one main file.

Basically, you need a raspberry pi micro-computer loaded with the software. Then you need some "smart" things for it to find on your network. I had a smart light switch that I was playing around with and the first time I was able to click a button on my phone and switch the light on and off was amazing! I was hooked!

Now, I've got the software running on my network and controlling a variety of smart things. Here's a rundown:

• Master Bedroom
• Paddle dimmer overhead light
• Bedroom lamp TP-Link plug
• Alexa Dot
• ESP8266 Dev board with temp/humidity/motion/lumens
• Living Room
• Google Home
• Chromecast
• Paddle switch for main entryway light
• Porch light (smart bulb)
• ESP8266 Dev board with temp/humidity/motion/lumens
• Xiaomi plant sensors
• Kitchen
• Alexa Dot
• ESP8266 Dev board with temp/humidity/motion/lumens
• Hacked Sonoff S20 plug for deck lights
• Basement
• ESP8266 Dev board with temp/humidity/motion/lumens
• Hacked sonoff switch for yoga lights & fireplace lights
• Garage
• ESP8266 Dev board with temp/humidity/motion/lumens
• Garadget garage door opener/sensor
• Yard
• Rachio smart sprinkler system

Although it currently needs some tweaking and updating, my mobile view looks like this. 

Now, what does all this do for me?

In short, I can see what's on/off and who's home from my mobile device anywhere. In addition, I have a few automations that I use and love.

Mainly - when it's time for bed I can say, "Alexa, turn on bedtime" and the overhead fan light will turn off and the small bedroom lamp will turn on. Simple yet effective because the overhead fan light switch is all the way across the room and by that time I'm too tired to move.

Secondly, when I arrive home, I get text alerts if my plants are too dry. My phone will say, "Water the Ficus Tree" or whatever plant needs water.

Lastly, the system will check to make sure my garage door closed after 10pm. 

In the past I've set up motion lights that turn on at night. This, however, was bothersome to my wife who's a very light sleeper. The door has to stay cracked open because of our cat so she sees the lights. Perhaps a future smart fix somewhere in there?

Next steps:

I'd like to fix the radiant floor heating with an on-demand water heater and attach that to a smart thermostat. That would control the room temperature in both the living room and kitchen which would be awesome!

I'd also like to put an infrared sender/receiver in the living room and be able to say, "Google(Alexa) - turn on the t.v." or "Set the t.v. to input 1"

Also, most of our t.v. time is in the cold winter months. We get a killer setting sun that ruins any movie in the evening. I'd like to set up a smart curtain closer and create a "scene" in Home Assistant where I can simply say, "Start Movie" and the lights would go out, curtains close and speakers on.

Always more to do...stay tuned!

Master Bathroom Remodel

Whoa, time flies and I totally forgot about this blog!!

It's nice to look back on the dining room wainscotting and utility room upgrade. Last February - about a year ago - we revamped our master bathroom. Here's the before images.

A wall split the vanity from the toilet & tub

View from the tub

Shower view once the wall was down

First thing was taking down that wall. I'm not a pro so I had to pay $200 for an engineer to tell me the wall was not load-bearing. Once it was down, it was amazing how much room there was in there!

Vanity removed and new wiring set up.

Had to build a new corner complete with outlet

One of the very first things we did was install my favorite feature! A bluetooth speaker/fan/light! This was a bit of a pain to install (crawl space, egk!) but once installed, we had wonderful lighting and music (not to mention a fan sucking up all the drywall dust!). Still, my favorite feature of this bathroom!

From there, we completed the walls, painted and began to work on the electrically heated floor.

110v electric floor heat layout. 

Laying tile over the electric line.

Looking good!

From there, we got the new vanity in place. Nice new dimming light above and lots of space for bathroom items!

Setting things up - Ikea vanity.

So much improvement!

Once things were operational again, we took a bit of a break. But, we never forgot about the terrible looking walls in the tub surround.

YUCK!

So, a few months later, while Jocelyn was out of town, I got working on my first wall tile project ever!

Water resistant cement board

Botoms up tiling job!

Notice the shelf on the left.

It's so nice to have a beautiful open bathroom space! The floor heats up in the morning on winter days (the cat loves it!) and we can simply hit a button to pair our phone with the loud bluetooth speaker! It's definitely loud enough to overpower the shower and the fan noise. My favorite feature! (did I mention that yet?)

Of course there's always more to do - namely one day we'll upgrade the toilet. But for now, it's 100% better!

Cheers,

-JV2

The Utility Room Renovation

The utility room is actually a laundry room that leads to a half bath. A door in the laundry room also goes out to the garage. Here is a quick sketch.

So, we started with moving the dryer to the same wall as the washer. We used the same electrical cable and outlet and simply re-routed everything through the crawl space. One tough part was putting the new dryer vent outlet into the exterior wall. It was a struggle, and I recommend getting the right tool for this right off the bat. We used a 4" hole saw.

Now that I'm looking at that sketch, look at all those doors! We would've loved to make the by the washer a pocket door but it doesn't look easy. The door that separates the half bath will eventually be a pocket door that slides into the water heater closet.

After moving the dryer, we added some lights and decided on a rustic industrial theme.

Once we could see what we're doing, we saw that we needed some space to work. We figured painting and flooring could be done in a weekend...yeah, that didn't happen.

Tearin it up.

 


We then cleaned it up, poured our self-leveling cement and painted on our water seal protector.

A love note since she knew I'd be working on the floor. I'm a lucky guy.

Finally ready to put the floor in, then the wainscoting and finally the pantry shelving.

I think it took us about 6 weeks all said and done. It looks awesome. Now we'll feel a little more prepared when we tile the upstairs bathroom. 

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Our first project - Wainscoting the kitchen in a weekend.

We had decided that the day we close on the  house we would celebrate - with a home improvement project. The kitchen had an ugly blue wallpaper that was peeling off. This wallpaper was all around both the kitchen and dining room from the floor to about 4 feet up. It was hideous!

So we closed in the morning (yay!) and went straight to Lowes (although we prefer Home Depot) and spent about 4 hours going up and down every aisle (we were excited ok?). In addition to everything we needed for the wainscoting project we got some odds and ends as well.

Here's a rundown of what we did.

Step 1: Prep
We removed the chair rail and baseboards around the kitchen/dining room and had to disconnect the electric baseboard heaters (which will hopefully eventually be removed in the future). We didn't bother removing the wallpaper - the wainscoting was put right on top. We also removed all outlet covers and tore off the cheap particle cardboard that was on the cabinets facing the dining room.

Step 2: Measure and cut
We really got this part done quite quickly and nearly finished that same day we closed! We used a circular saw we borrowed from Boulder's tool library - which is cheap but not as cheap as asking our neighbor as it turns out. They were cut to size, and liquid nails were used in addition to finishing nails. At times we struggles with the finishing nails and wish we had a nail gun or smaller finishing nails - ours were at least 1.5 inches and 1 inch would've been sufficient. In order to cut the holes for the electric baseboard heaters and outlets we used a little cutting tool borrowed from the neighbor that worked perfectly.

Step 3: Replace/add baseboards and chair rails
When we removed the baseboards and chair rails we marked them on the back so we would know exactly where they go. We also had to match up our baseboard/chair rail to some new ones because some spots were missing. .This went without a hitch and Jocelyn even found a nice way to make corners look good with a small piece of dowel.

Step 4: Paint
This was likely the most frustrating step - mostly because we used latex paint and generally wished we hadn't. It still looks good in the end but next time we'll use a different kind of paint.

Not only did this project make the kitchen look nicer but with the white wainscoting everything was brightened up! We didn't even realize how dark our kitchen/dining room was until we completed this project and saw how nice and bright it can be!

While in the middle of this project we also put in a dimmer switch for the light/fan over the dining room table -ya know, to set the mood. This was also the time I put a hole in the wall, patched it up and re-opened the hole due to killing the internet - you can read about that here.

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Oops - killing the internet by trying to remove the landline.

Ok, so maybe I was a bit excited to clean this place up and remove unnecessary things attached to walls. I like open walls and when there's a bunch of unused hardware it bothers me.

That was the case with the land line phone jack in the kitchen area. It was a a little square plastic that had yellowed with time and nobody has used a land line in this house in ages. I figured, why not remove it and patch up any hole the wires came through?

If you're in IT or work at an internet company you're probably laughing at me right now.

I unscrewed the thing, took an knife to the wires in the back (I know!) and shoved the wires in the wall, trashed the ugly yellowed plastic plate and threw a drywall patch over the hole. I did not know the internet was down until after it dried, sanded it and dried again.

At first we didn't even think it was my fault. The internet was down - so what? It's likely an outage in the area or the router needs reset. Well, after about 1 hour with customer service they say it's not on their end and they'll send someone out in 4 days! In addition, he repeats several times that if the technician needs to come into the house and has to fix something it will be an $80 charge! This is after I tell him that I cut out the land line and he said it shouldn't affect the internet - that guy was wrong.

So, after talking with my very smart roommate we decide to open the hole in the wall, despite my beautiful patch job, and fetch the plastic plate out of the garbage. We browse some blogs about IT and DSL connections and attempt to twist wires together. I'm starting to feel like it's hopeless when voila! Andy the roommate happened to get the right wires together and the internet is back! SWEET!

I still didn't want that ugly jack on the wall so we opened the hole big enough to fit the whole thing in the wall and patched right over it. If there's ever a problem in the future we'll have to pay to get a dedicated DSL line - which seems like an unneeded additional cost at this point.

Internet is really the only "unnecessary" bill we have at this house. There's no cable package or any of that jazz. In fact, once I get a ladder I'm removing the ugly satellite on the south side of the house! It's right in the way of my future solar collector!

1st quarter review, 2015

Ok, it's near the end of April and the first part of the year was quite busy. We closed on the house in January and have since done wainscoting in the dining/kitchen, completely remodeled the utility room complete with re-routing the dryer and laying down tile floor, faux wood style and added a pantry, garage refrigerator turned into a kegerator and lots of lighting in a few rooms. Not to mention quite a few odds and ends throughout the house.

Jocelyn's mom came for a pleasant visit which also welcomed a break from endless house projects. When looking at our financial picture, it turns out we've let our credit card go a bit. It should take about 4-6 months to get that back down to a 0 balance. This was largely due to me needing a vehicle. I got a used 2002 Honda for less than 4k and I'm hoping to only drive it when absolutely needed - which hasn't been going well.

So, we're up for a break on expensive projects and are targeting that credit card balance. During the summer we have a few trips back home plus a Redwoods camping trip - and preliminary expense research looks very good at around $400 per person for a 10-day trip.

May the warmer weather bring abundance in health and wealth, and to you and yours.