Following the initial home improvements I did some interior work on the house. This is my first time owning a place, so it was nice to be able to customize things that I wouldn’t have bothered with for a rental that I would leave in a year or so. I bought a Nest doorbell, lock, and thermostat.
Home Automation

It’s nice being able to automate everything and control it from my phone. With the lock, you can create temporary passcodes for friends and family that can be used a certain number of times or only used during certain hours. The doorbell is nice because it lets me see who’s at the door and it keeps a running recording of the past few days so I can look back and see if anything suspicious happened. The doorbell will even send automatic notifications to me if a package is delivered or if my girlfriend or I go outside to retrieve the package. My favorite feature of the Nest lineup is the thermostat though, I like being able to sit in my bed and adjust the A/C to make it cooler. It also saves me money by automatically setting the temperature warmer when I’m not at home. The only thing I keep forgetting is to set the temp erature lower when I arrive back in Florida from a trip so it’s cool by the time I arrive at my house.

Following up on the thermostat and doorbell, I bought some smart plugs and set them up with timers and integrated them with the Google Home assistant to be able to tell the lights around the house on or off as well as being able to control them from outside the home.
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