Aside from getting our behinds kicked by the ceiling drywall we had a pretty successful day regarding the guest house. This morning we took a trip to Conrad, think home depot for all things electronic, to pick up most of the things we need for lighting and wiring.
Aside from figuring out which lights we could use and what transformers would work together with the home automation system we also picked up all the cables we need for satellite, computer network and audio. All it all it ended up cheaper than anticipated, which was most of the good news for the day.
As I am writing this, I noticed we never wrote about what we have planned in regards to lighting and electronics. So, I guess this would be a good time to let you in on our plans.
Lighting:
We want to experiment with home automation for the first time here. Mostly the automation we are going for will focus around setting light scenes. The building is relatively dark to begin with, given that it is located in the shadiest part of the farm, therefore we are putting a lot of thought into artificial lighting in the room.
Most of the lighting will come from halogen ceiling spots. We have selected spots which can be tilted by 40 degrees so we can reach all corners of the room. Furthermore, we are planning to paint a “faux skylight” above the bed which will be framed by molding containing a light tube. Always very important is having reading lights for each side of the bed. We got lucky in that department at Conrad for only 20EUR each.
To set a different mood, we hoped to use color changing LED spot lights, but found a much cooler (and cheaper) alternative: The Philips Living Colors! Its a portable lamp with a color changing LED and a remote control to change the light.
For the bathroom we will also focus on using recessed halogen spots, as well as some wall mounted lights by the mirror.
Entertainment:
We love music and movies and both are an important part of who we are. So, while planning for the guesthouse we realized quickly we needed some pretty cool gadgets in there. Thankfully a lot of them we already have laying around the house already, don’t ask.
We are in the process of digitizing our music and movie collection to make it available through network all through the house. Therefore the guest house should also have access to that server. For sound we will use a 5.1 Dolby surround sound system as well as separate speakers recessed in the ceiling in the bathroom.
The center piece for the entertainment part of the guest room will be a computer running an open source software called MediaPortal, basically a free version of MS Windows Media Center. We are about to download and install it right now to see how that goes – but so far it looks good.
Of course all the wiring required for the audio and video will be placed inside the walls and hidden out of view.
This might be a bit of an overkill for a guest room, but altogether it really serves as a prototype for our master suite (when we ever get to that) and deep down we are really just two geeks who love fancy electronics to finally work right 😉
