We finally have a lot. About a quarter acre will be ours. There’s no back neighbors, but houses on left and right and, if I remember correctly, one roughly across the street. The space behind us has a small canal, so we’ll be building a fence as well since we now have a four year old.
As we move forward with things, I’d like to comment a bit on the process. When we originally joined the program, we were told it would be about two to two-and-a-half years when we would have a house and move in. It’s been two years and four months, so we will definitely not be making it at two-and-a-half years. It looks more like it will be about a year from now, so that’s closer to three and a half years.
Still, we are grateful. This is a process, and we expected things to take longer than originally promised (some pre-COVID families had waited as much as eight years), we also are eager to get going and see our house progress. Our lot is still a wild, southeast US lot full of trees and bushes, but one day, it’ll have a house and some grass. We’ll have a garden, a playground for the child.
As is, we live in a less than ideal apartment that keeps getting more expensive with neighbors that make things difficult in a town far from family and friends and just scratching by. One day, that will change.
With our house, we have built what we need, not necessarily what we want, so it will be a smaller house with two beds and two bathrooms. Not overly large, but just enough for what we need to grow old in. It will have a garage, appliances, windows, doors, lights and fans. A complete house that we will, in thirty years or less, own outright. I’ve asked to be allowed to run ethernet myself after the electrical is done but before the drywall is up, so hopefully we can do that. I’ve also asked for a few things for our child since he does have specific needs, but nothing really outrageous.
Since we will be working from home, I’m planning heavily on the networking of our house. There is only cable internet available, but we can work with that since that is all we have now anyway. I plan on setting up the house with UniFi products, I already have a Cloudkey Gen2 Plus and a couple cameras, but we will be increasing that with at least one switch and a gateway, though I’m not sure which one yet. We’ll also be adding more cameras as soon as we know what the layout of the house will be and where we can put cameras to cover the most of the yard.
With that in place, next up is smart home items. I’ve ordered a ratgdo garage door controller, we’ve got a POE switch, and I have some Inovelli humidity sensing power switches so we can automate the fan in the bathrooms. I haven’t decided which switches to go with for the lights yet, but it will probably be either Inovelli or Lutron, and as the lights will all be dimmable LEDs in the ceiling, it should work out fine. I think we can also automate the ceiling fans, which may limit us to Lutron Caseta switches since I know they can do that part.
Aside from those switches, we may not have too much else that will be automated, at least not at first. I hope we can get smart blinds, but those can be expensive, and as we live in a hurricane-prone area, I’d like to get some sort of solar generator and backup power solution. With that all set, we’ll be good to go and prepared for most of what we can handle.
I know for some reason, Bubba on the Road has recently grown in popularity. It saddens me to convert it over to smart home technology and building a house instead of writing about living in an RV and traveling, but that is where life has taken us. I may one day have the ability to build a Camper Van, in which case we’ll focus on that, but for now, its all in on the house as that is our major goal for the time being. I hope we don’t lose any followers from our shift to a location-locked residence, but I’l try to keep it entertaining.
