My appointment was with Steve Catindig at the location in Williamsburg. He was incredibly helpful in taking the time to walk me through everything as well as explaining all the options and giving me a little input as well without being the least bit pushy. We had been talking back and forth over e-mail for the last two weeks or so and since I'd been able to go over my floorpan and most of my decisions ahead of time I figured this meeting would go pretty quickly. In the end I was there for almost two hours :) What can I say, I like to talk and I love techie things. I'm surprised it didn't take longer lol!
The first thing that we went through was the actual structured wiring aspect of the build. What connections I wanted (cable/data/etc) and what rooms I wanted them in. Our specific model includes 4 hook ups standard with anything beyond that being an option and an additional cost. We decided that it would be best to go ahead and put in the connections we wanted ahead of time rather than trying to hack everything up later on to add to it. We chose to do cable hookups in all the bedrooms as well as the great room, basement and the garage. We did hardwired data connections in the great room, master bedroom, bedroom 3 (kid's room) and bedroom 4 (office) with the master connection box down in the basement. We spend a good bit of time watching Netflix and using Apple TV so having a direct data connection is ideal at those viewing locations and having data connections on all three floors will make it easy to configure wireless routers to give us good wifi throughout the whole house.
The next thing we went over is the audio/home theater setup we wanted. We plan to use our basement as a theater room/ primary den so I wanted to make sure I had it wired ahead of time for home theater as getting to anything in the basement once the house is finished is virtually impossible. We also wanted some sort of audio in the kitchen/morning room and provisions to add audio on the deck once it's built for entertaining. I hadn't completely made up my mind on how I wanted to setup the surround sound in the basement as there are a lot of different options and equipment types so I relieved heavily on Steve's advice here. He let me hear a Demo setup that they had setup there which used Klipsch in-ceiling speakers for the home theater and after just a few minutes of listening I was completely sold. Being able to have room filling sound without having to have the floor space taken up by big cumbersome speakers is very appealing to me and after hearing the setup they have there I was convinced. So were are having them do a complete pre-wire for in-ceiling surround sound, with us adding the speakers ourselves once we close and get settled in.
As for the audio in the kitchen and deck I went with a set of Klipsch (better) speakers in the kitchen with Structured Cable providing the speakers and doing the install with a wall mounted volume control. They had all three speaker options at the store for me to hear and it was absolutely worth the upgrade price to get the "better" speakers out of the good, better, best choices. I also am having them do a prewire out to the back of the house for deck speakers with a pre-wire for a volume control by the back door, and all of this to be wired down to the basement to connect to the audio system there.
With all the exciting things picked out it was time to get to the last part of the meeting, the security system. We currently have a fairly nice system in our house now, the we had installed about a year ago and had decided that we wanted to have a nice system in the new house as well for peace of mind. After talking through the options we Steve I decided on the 2gig setup for all of the options and upgrade potential that it offers. It gives us all the alarm functionality that we are looking for but also supports Z-Wave to give up the ability to add in some home automation stuff later down the road. Not to mention it looks awesome as well!
So that's basically the last of our selections to be made on the house. We have our pre-construction meeting this coming Tuesday and we are anxiously awaiting the ground breaking and the beautiful home to rise from that hole in the ground. Once construction starts you will all get to see lots of pictures instead of all this typing!
I also made a quick stop off at a furniture place in Williamsburg to pick up our first piece of furniture for the new house, a formal dining room set!! I saw it at Aladdin Consignment and fell in love with it. It comes with 8 chairs and a table with a removable leaf all done in a dark expresso finish that will look fantastic in our new dining room. Best part is, it was a fantastic price. Cant beat that!
More to come!!!
This was SO helpful! I need data connections throughout the home I'm building as well.
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