Children – Modern Anachronist

Adding smarts to an old house

This summer, as I invoked Siri to light up the dinner table on the patio, my father-in-law’s girlfriend said, “You have a smart house?”

I’ve never really thought about it, but I suppose I do. I’ve got lights that are tied to sunset & sunrise. I’ve got lights that turn on if the wife or I come home after dark. I can control the HVAC system from anywhere in the world.

It’s not something that I consciously set out to do, it just slowly happened over a course of several years. In this post I’ll describe some of the lessons about “smart homes” that I’ve learned the hard way over the years.

The toys that make noise*

*hat tip to Dennis Leary for the title.

With an eight-year -old and a six-year-old, I can’t believe how long it took me to figure this out. Anyone with children knows the pain of loud toys, especially early in the morning.

The Cursed Swing Set

At the old house, we had an ancient wooden swing set for the kids to play on. I wasn’t going to move it to the new house. My wife convinced her father to buy one for the new house as a Christmas present to the little ones. All we had to do was to pick one out & he would break out the credit card.