Our New House!

More pictures to come!

My wife and I just bought a new house in Seattle. While we've lived with each other for over five years, we consider this our first home together. We're excited to start furnishing the rooms (we're leasing a fully furnished place right now, so we have to start from scratch) and put our own stamp on it.

I'm especially excited because I view this house as a grand experiment in modern living! I freely admit that I'm a data dork. I'm going to use this blog to document my attempt to make this a fully connected home.

It will also be interesting to explore the philosophical ramifications of an always connected house. Our society, it seems to me, is demanding more and more openness. What happens when that collides with the homeowner? What if the government mandates that you send your energy usage to a central database, so they can better monitor power consumption? Do these devices make you vulnerable to cyber attacks? Do our washing machines really need to Tweet?!

What I'm most excited about, though, is the installation of solar panels. Once the paperwork for the house is finalized I am going to reach out to SolarCity to see if my property is a good candidate for solar power. If it is, I want to see if we can become carbon neutral (or maybe even carbon negative!) as homeowners. Hopefully my experience with this process will help people decide if they should install solar too.