 Come on guys, let me show you! For those of you who haven't been keeping up, this is my new house and there didn't used to be stairs there. In fact, a lot of the things around me didn't used to be here and because the drywall is going on tomorrow, this is my last chance to take you guys around and show you how we took a regular old fixer-upper from 1990 something and turned it into what I am calling the ultimate tech house. Starting of course with our LAN gaming center room, which is wired for power, network, and even optical DisplayPort and USB back to our dedicated server room. There's gonna be this and a lot more to show you guys and it is all brought to you by our sponsor. Thanks to PCBWay for sponsoring this video. PCBWay offers all kinds of PCB services as well as 3D printing, CNC, sheet metal fabrication, and injection molding. Check them out today at the link down below. First of all, I wouldn't have been able to do any of this without... Well, I wouldn't have been able to do this without Jake too, so you should come be a part of this. This is gonna be a fun threesome. Jake and I had some strong disagreements about the best way to do the LAN center. First, our plan was to build five dedicated machines to sit at each of the five stations. So three along this wall here, another two along that wall over there, and then another one that's over there that's kind of like a utility one. The idea was that the kids computers are gonna be one, two, three, where the screens will face the stairs and we can sneak up on them and make sure that they're not looking at anything untoward. Of course none of that was what we disagreed about. We both said look, with evolving tech standards, we got DisplayPort 2.0 coming, we got USB 4, all that kind of stuff coming. We're gonna need extra space, so we ran two conduits all the way back to the mechanical room, some of which is full with the current standard cables. But I said we should just have one box here with access to everything, and then we should just cable manage everything under the desks. Jake insisted! Hear me out. I'm thinking each station is gonna probably have an up desk, right? Maybe, I don't know. If you want to do that, having those cables cable managed with the desks, that's a nightmare! If you're gonna do it, just do it right! The problem is that you're not wrong, you're just annoying. The contractor advised us that you can only have so many right angles in a conduit before it just becomes impossible to pull a cable through it. So what we've got then is here, where one of our rear top speakers in the theater room is going to be, you'll just pull out the speaker and we're gonna have a pull station. So you'll just kind of use these pull cords here and run everything through as you need. They didn't actually run any of the existing cables in the conduit. Both conduits should be basically empty. Oh really? They ran all the fiber, you can see right there, and all the DisplayPort right there outside, so those don't take up the conduits, we've got full capacity for new stuff. Those live in the wall forever. Yeah! Genius. Yeah. This room sounds scary. It's eerily quiet in here. I've been so particular about everything, like they replaced the old inefficient air conditioning unit with a heat pump, and I was like, it cannot go right outside this window! And they told you you were unreasonable, and they were right. But this room is crazy and the sound is great, like we have the new exterior door instead of just the glass double doors that I wanted. We're putting a solid door here. It's far from my only unreasonable request, and I think I got away with the rest of them. So it's wired for seven surround speakers, two subwoofers, and four top channels for that great Dolby Atmos experience. And then cooling has been carefully considered. So this cabinet here is going to have a mesh bottom. No, no, no, no. What? It's not going to have a mesh bottom. What happened to my mesh bottom? Your mesh starts part way up because the bottom is for pillows and blankets, for comfort and actually living in the space. Yes, it has drawers. Okay. So your mesh starts probably like here. I thought you said this was our room. So it'll have a mesh bottom. Oh, you guys need a room for yourself? Yeah. Okay. Okay. And then we're going to have a couple of banks of Noctua fans, like super low RPM running on the top, constantly circulating air through this cabinet here, which is important because the original plan was for us to have the receiver in the mechanical room. So funny story, the electrician actually terminated every speaker location to both the mechanical room and to here. So for whatever reason, the cooling doesn't work out in here. We can actually run the receiver and, you know, Xbox, PlayStation, gaming PC, all that stuff over there. But ideally, we want to have it in here because it's a little bit easier for the less tech savvy members of the family. No, it's not just for me. When people have friends over and they're bringing games or whatever, less tech savvy friends. Then we've got conduit from the bottom where we'll have power and networking and then more conduit over to the mechanical room, going up to TV height if we decided to do a direct view TV or all the way to projector location way at the top where we've got power. So the idea is no matter what kind of media thing, we've either got it wired or we've got conduit. I don't know if you can tell, but Linus is a little indecisive. Some people call that future proofing. I call it not being able to make a decision. I call it content. You haven't considered any of the stuff that's going to make this room look nice and comfortable, like all these beautiful wall sconces that we're going to have. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And our awesome theater seating that we've worked out. Oh, and this is cool. Check this out. We haven't done an HVAC update in a long time, but here they are. Smart dampers on the HVAC. OK, we'll show you in more detail in the mechanical room. The dampers they ended up installing are pretty similar to the ones we showed in the video before, but the plan has changed a lot. Do I know about this? Yeah, I gave you an update. Basically, the system that they ended up using is I think it's called American standard AccuLink. It's proprietary AF. If you want to be able to control that system with its full potential, you have to use their thermostats. The American standard AccuLink Platinum 1050. Do you feel platinum right now? No. No? It's kind of ugly. I guess that's kind of the American way. We made our own standards. Rest of the world? The main reason we wanted to use smart thermostats is so we could detect presence in individual spaces and shut it off if we're not using it. It's very possible that Linus won't have any friends or coworkers come over for a while. Maybe his rec room doesn't get used, in which case we don't need to be paying to cool it. We don't need to be paying to heat it. So. Hey, you promised you'd come over. Use the pool. Now, Home Assistant has a Nexia smart home, which is like their Z-Wave based control thing that's not actually like controllable with Z-Wave integration. So we can still talk to it. OK. But it's cloud. It works, but it's cloud. I said no batteries, no cloud. We just put a bounty out. Like just say, OK, five grand, five grand right now. Somebody make a local integration for Home Assistant for these. I don't want to talk to their stupid cloud to adjust my thermostat. It's ridiculous. You can make a pay flow plan to do it. Yeah. Unless someone bounties it first. Yeah. Chop chop. I don't know if five grand is even reasonable. I have no idea how much work that is. Oh, and this is how decisions get made at our company. Linus just willy nilly throws a number out there and it's like, oh, now we have now we committed to it. I guess we have to do it now. OK. Make it 10 grand. What? No, stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Five. Actually, now's a good time to. Wait, wait, wait, wait. No, no, no. I'm not done. Oh. Come here. So what does this mean for our young explorer Linus? Oh, lordy. Well, it means we're going to have two thermostats in every single zone. What? Two thermostats. Seriously? Did you not know this yet? OK, I didn't know this. We're going to have an Ecobee and we're going to have a heat pump. Now, the other crappy part about those thermostats is they don't have a setup for hydronic heating, like what we have here, which is water that runs through the house that's heated, that heats the whole house. So for now, we have to have an Ecobee that's going to be running here. And then we're going to have our heat pump, which is actually for cooling. This is going to be so ugly. It's going to be a circle for the Ecobee, right? And then a square or rectangle for the... It'll look great. You're ruining my aesthetic. Yes. Before you type that angry comment, yes, we know the only time you would turn down or turn off your hydronic heat is when you're going to be away for a week or something like that. We know, please. Speaking of hydronic heat, shout out to IBC, by the way, this mechanical room used to have a huge boiler unit like this for the in-floor heating here. And then it had two giant hot water tanks so that the whole house could be serviced with hot water. All of that has been replaced by this. They make super efficient boilers and their installer went absolutely overboard on this setup. And when I came in, get this, they were like, oh, oh, and don't worry. This is all going to be copper too. We're going to make sure it's all copper. I was like that. That was not what stood out to me about it. I was like, this is so overkill. This room has more bling than I do. I know. Oh, it runs Linux 2.6. That's kind of old. Oh, why'd you take it off? So that it's off. Andy is rolling over and is not grave right now. Perception. I don't even care. So what I read on their website is that all their residential boilers are at least, it's like 95.7% efficient, at least. This one's probably even more because it's like the top spec one, but it's cute. It's wall mounted. This is some crazy wiring you've got going on here. Yeah. You might be looking at this thinking that is an insane amount of cat 6A and you would have even missed all of this back here, but it's because of all the access points. It's because of the cell booster, the cameras. That's not even cell booster. Oh, wow. Okay. Right. Moving out to the rec room. This space is going to be awesome. Once again, indecision. I originally said I don't want conduit back to the mechanical room. Oh, so you finally admit it. Changed my mind. I changed my mind, but probably anything here. This is probably going to be where the Nintendo Switch goes. This is where our VR gaming setup is going to be. This room is hard wired with 12 volt to all four corners for valve index base stations or whatever kind of external tracking solution we might end up needing in the future. And then we've got a couple of power circuits here. So if we want to put game consoles or anything like that, the plan is maybe like a big 77 inch TV, something like that. Wow. This really is a three-story. I saw you look at me and then you look at Jake just to confirm your decision. Well, I thought you said that you didn't want me to make eye contact with the third party if we ever did it. There's going to be six total in-ceiling speakers in here, which is yeah, they listened to you. Not me. Apparently you told them that it was supposed to have another set. I told them four. You told them six. They put in six. We were here when we talked about it. They put in six. That's what they told us. And there's going to be a subwoofer right here. So this is going to be like two subwoofers in this room. Okay. See, this is why the contractors hate me because I have you changing things and then I have Jake adding things. Okay. One big subwoofer. Okay. Deal. So there's going to be shelves where you can put, I don't know, storage books, whatever you want, knickknacks. And then on some of the upper shelves, there's actually going to be carpet inside the shelf itself. So our cat can just hang out here. And then we're actually going to have a little, what do you call those? Bench. Bench? Well, it's not a bench if you lay on it. There's going to be storage back here where you can put books or word games or whatever. And you can chill back here and just hide out and read. Hide from your family? Yeah. That kind of thing. Or the cat can hide there. That'll be my spot. So what happened here is there used to be actual like cabinets here and here. And then it was square for like an old school CRT tube TV. So what we did is instead of completely redoing this, we actually just took these out and then they built this little skirt. So this is going to get painted black. The TV is going to go on a wall mount right here. So the TV actually is going to sit and it's just going to have this black border kind of around it. So it just kind of gets lost in the- Infinity TV. Sure. Yeah. You could think of it that way. And then the reason they only did these vertical two by sixes is so that cable management and cooling back here is going to be super easy. Oh, it's just going to stay like this, right? Yeah. Throw it down there. Pull out the TV and just be like, oh yeah, I need to run that thing. Yeah. It's right there. Yeah, there's conduit back there. There's conduit everywhere. There's conduit on every floor. There is. Do you want to see my new kitchen countertops? I love this one. This one looks awesome. You better love it. It's nice. Admit it. It's nice. Come on. I don't know. Come on. It's okay. Help her out. Help her out, Jake. It looks dirty. Well, it is dirty right now. Oh, look. It still looks dirty. Oh no. My annual review is coming up this week. I'm going to get a bad one. Okay. At least tell me you like this blue that I picked. I do like the blue. The blue is very nice. Yes. You should have seen when my mom got new countertops. I was like, oh, that was like awful. She was like, Jake. What a good sight. They grew on me. Once again, indecisive. So both of the computer workstation areas here and then over on that side where Yvonne's going to sit. Hi, Yvonne. Are wired up for ethernet, power, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. And the only thing Jake and I have to figure out is how we're going to be able to push the power and reset buttons remotely because Yvonne has not been a fan of it. Even with it on the other side of the wall through one simple close door. Okay. It happens all the time. My computer just doesn't work all the time. Yes. Or my monitor won't turn on and there's no way to fix it without just restarting it. I think it's Thunderbolt related. I think Thunderbolt on PC can just be kind of flaky. So guess what? You're getting like raw dog direct optical display. So because my desk will be over there, so I'll be facing this way. I'm going to be streaming, right? So we're going to have a super cool streaming background. Okay. This was actually supposed to be my bookshelf where I put my arts and crafts stuff on. And somehow this turned into streaming background. I don't know. I offered to give you this whole room and you were like, no, I don't want to be by myself in here. I want to be where you are. And so I was all like, all right, you know, yeah, I'll be near you, you know, if that's what you need. Okay. So then being near me turned into taking up my space, more of my space, taking up my storage. Our storage. There's a bunch of power in here so that we can have like cool lighting on the shelves, put little knickknacks on there. I don't know. Maybe there'll be RGB involved and that's it for this room. Main changes in here. These old speakers are going to go, we're going to drive all over them. They're going to have the same Klipsch in-ceiling speakers as pretty much the entire rest of the house. They sound great. So that's the thing that's most important. Those aren't the main changes. There's so many other things in here that are going to change. Like we don't have ants anymore in the walls. Oh yeah. That was a problem. We have this beautiful- All the chewed up wood and stuff. Yeah. We have all this really nice new tile. Okay. At least Jake and I agree on this, right Jake? Yeah, that one's pretty good. Okay. Cool. I think it looks kind of dirty. Oh my gosh. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. And then there's all this like, okay. I don't want to talk about the floor. This one that we thought was going to be really nice when we did a bigger patch of it, it ended up having green undertones. Now we've settled on one of these two. So people can vote. What actually prompted doing renos in this place was actually the master bathroom. That's the only reason we needed to do like permitted renos. Well, not in the stairs. The stairs, yeah. I don't regret the stairs. I don't regret the stairs either. And I'm glad we did the bathroom, but that's just how much the scope of the project has changed. It's crazy. The shower is going to be awesome. Got that dual head shower. So- I call this side- The shower used to be in here with the toilets, and it was just like this tiny little thing. But this is going to be amazing. This is awesome. Oh, this is nice. So if we ever need to get access to the air handler or anything like that, it is that easy. Love it. I don't know where the light switch is. Oh, did you ask them to put one in? I don't know. Oh, so got ethernet, got power, just going to do like a little wall mount. This is where the driving simulator is going, right? Driving sim. It's like real race cars. It's like real race cars. You're actually like laying down. There's going to be a cellular repeater in this hallway, I think in the dead center, right? Yeah, that one's there. Yep. And then cameras. So the idea is outside of bedrooms and bathrooms to have pretty good coverage of the house and the area around it. Oh, we should talk- We should show them the cell repeater in the garage. Yeah. So the idea behind the cell repeater is that there's a rooftop unit that's going to kind of- We're going to kind of point at wherever the best reception is, because cell reception here is terrible. This is the coolest cell repeater you'll ever see. Most cell repeaters suck because they're all analog. This one, it's digital. We're going to do a video on that, so stay tuned. Get subscribed, you know? Oh yeah, we haven't done any LTT storm engines. Indoor hoodie. GPU shirt. Oh yeah, I got the underwear. Okay. Don't act like you've never seen it. Either of you. Wait, all of this? Four boxes of cell repeater? What am I even looking at? It's the j-ball from the antenna. Okay. Oh yeah, car charger. So there's the big old rugged power cable for it. It's going to be mounted to this wall right here. It's a dual head, which means that if we ever had two electric vehicles parked in here, we'd be able to charge them. Realistically, it only really comes up when we have guests visiting, like her parents and James always wants to pull into the garage and charge his car when he comes over. So we'll be all set for that. Well, the cool thing about that too is it's got a 40 amp circuit. And then when you have two cars plugged in, it splits the power. So they both charge. 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You'll even get a free bonus premium vehicle just for signing up. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out, do you have a playlist for the new house updates? We'll have a playlist.