A recent article in the Vancouver Courier was touting the benefits of home automation. The article is here. One of my longest standing dreams is to automate a house (better if it is my house).

I have been playing with the Insteon hardware thinking that it was a good replacement for my aged X10 hardware. After reading the article above I worry that I am not going far enough to get the latest and greatest into my house.

I have been purchasing modules for aartech.ca and have been impressed with the Insteon switch that I got so far. Getting it to talk to my computer interface was a snap and I love the fact that it reports its state (on or off) back to my computer.

I was a little worried about the quality. I was quite disappointed with X10 wall switches that I had purchased the last time I wanted to automate my home. This switch was quite nice - with a nice soft click reinforced by a fancy LED display to indicate whether the switch was on or off. Tactile plus visual works for me.

I am now trying to figure out how many more of these things I should get. I am also considering the dimmer switches. I never use the dimmer part of switches in my house but if I could pre-set I suspect that would change everything.

One of the best things about having a house is having a yard. It took a bit of getting used to having so much outdoors space, but it just feels right now. Naturally I was so grateful that one of my pledges was to take care of my lawn and the surrounding area. In particular, I felt it was important to make sure that the lawn was well kept up and that litter and other garbage was promptly taken care of. Naturally, I wasn’t able to gage the extent of this commitment at the time.

In the following 6 months I religiously strolled around our property at all hours of the day and night picking up the misplaced plastic bags, yogurt containers and other unsightly garbage that the neighbourhood deposits on our lawn. Despite the large number of pets in the area I only ended up moving animal waste on two occasions.

For me, the toughest part of the task of picking up after strangers is picking up their cigarette butts. These little butts are particularly nasty as they have that unmistakable stench of smoke on them. One time I left them in my back pocket and couldn’t get he smell out of my pants and our couch for days.

Perhaps it is because I can imagine the candour with which the smoker casually discards their litter on my lawn that makes the task even more distasteful. I don’t smoke and don’t really know anyone that does.

Observation: there is no predominant brand of cigarettes left on our lawn. :/

When we took possession of our new house it felt like we were stepping into someone else’s life. We were leaving behind an older two bedroom apartment close to the main thoroughfare of the city. We lived pretty modestly, sharing laundry facilities with the building, storing our bikes in the common area in the basement and limiting the number of monthly expenses we incurred (like cablevision).

This looked like it might change when we moved. Our new house had a built in alarm system, satellite TV and a phone in every room. In addition to a (front loading) washer and dryer, the house came with a dishwasher, gas stove, fridge with an ice maker(!) and other modern amenities. While not having to guard the washing was a welcome change, I personally felt that I had lived my entire life without a dishwasher and didn’t really need to start using one. Of course, we very quickly got used to the dishwasher.

Perhaps the biggest change was the jacuzzi style bathtub. Now while I had never really wanted a jacuzzi, having one in the house felt silly. My first thought was ‘how much energy would this thing take’? Still, I found myself showing off this luxury when giving tours of the house.

Now that we have lived there for almost a year, I can report that while I still have regular baths, I have used the jacuzzi no more than five times. We have also stopped subscribing to the satellite TV and we do not use the fireplace. I am happy to report that we use more than just two bedrooms in our house though, but it has taken us a while to figure out what to do with the excess space.I hope we don’t end up like our friends and use the extra space to stash stuff from CostCo.

After years of believing that it would never happen, we finally managed to get our dream house. We lucked out in the way that couples sometimes do, and now we join the ranks of those with mortgages that last longer than we do.

Our home purchase came at a perfect time in our life. We were leaving our apartment with a 11 month old. We were perfectly happy in our old place (in fact we miss it still) but it seemed time to find a place that was quieter, had a little more space and had the potential to allow our boy to play outside.

We have now been in it for about ten months. Things seem to be going well with no major headaches. Halloween, Christmas and other events take on a new tone. We have had one party and one power outage (coincidentally the outage directly followed our party). We have started doing home style projects and we always seem to have things to do on the weekends.

Some of our first ‘improvements’ include purchasing a security system, putting in several bird feeders and planting things. We have held off on the home theatre system, computers in each room and home automation (more on that later :)).