If you own a home, you are bound to remodel at some point. Remodeling comes with the territory. The only question is how you will go about each of your projects. Will you remodel with a traditional mindset still stuck in the 1980s and 90s, or will you remodel with the intent of bringing your home into the 21st century?
Transforming your 1990s house into a 21st-century home means remodeling with a smart home mindset. It means embracing technologies that did not exist when your house was first built. The idea is to make your home more efficient, comfortable, and secure. You do that with smart home technology.
Vivint Smart Home is one of the leading providers of home automation and security equipment in North America. If you were to use them as your equipment supplier, you could employ technology in just about every room in your home. From a typical kitchen remodel to installing a state-of-the-art video surveillance system, there are a ton of things you could do.
Assess Your Home for Safety
The place to start is safety. Any time you embark on a major remodeling project, you should first step back and assess your home for safety and security. Let’s say you’re remodeling the kitchen. Take a look around before you make any plans. Ask yourself if there are any inherent weaknesses in the kitchen space that make your home less secure.
Maybe you have sliding glass doors that would be easy for burglars to breach. Perhaps there is something in your kitchen that presents a fire hazard. Whatever the case might be, assessing your home for safety gives you a starting point for making technology choices.
A safety assessment might motivate you to install a complete home security system. That’s fine. But you might not need a whole system. You might just be looking at some carbon monoxide detectors and an extra video camera.
Think About Improving Efficiency
The next part of remodeling with a smart home mindset is to think of ways to improve efficiency. In the kitchen, that normally means energy-efficient appliances and modern lighting. You can improve efficiency elsewhere in the home by installing a smart thermostat, replacing your old water heater with a more efficient one, and so forth.
LED lighting is always a good idea for improving efficiency. When you combine LED lights with smart home controllers, you can program your system to ensure that lights are not wasting energy. Program them to turn off when there’s no one in the room. Create lighting scenes for different times of the day.
Consider the Convenience Factor
Last but not least is convenience. Making a home more convenient is one of the primary motivations for adopting home automation. Convenience is a big factor in a world in which most of us are running around with too much to do and not enough time to get it all done.
Imagine having to only speak a single sentence to turn on the lights when you have your hands full with the baby. Consider the possibility of unlocking the front door with your smartphone so that you don’t have to fumble with your case when you’re trying to wrangle groceries.
There is nothing wrong with making your home more convenient through automation technology. When you make life more convenient in one area, it frees up time, energy, and effort you can put into something else. That is good.
Think It Through
Remodeling with a smart home mindset means looking honestly at safety issues, trying to improve efficiency, and considering how much convenience you can add to daily life. With all those considerations in mind, think your project through from beginning to end. Planning is key here.
There is a lot that goes into designing and installing an integrated smart home system. Yes, you can always modify your system at some point down the road, but if you think your remodel through to the extent that you cover all the bases upfront, you’re more likely to end up with a system that doesn’t need to be modified for quite some time.
And now you know. That’s how to remodel with a smart home mindset.
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