Building a Smart Home? The 10 Things to Get Right Before Drywall
We get called into a lot of beautiful new homes to fix smart home systems that were wrong from the day the drywall went up. Almost none of the problems are about the gear. They are about decisions made, or skipped, months earlier. If you are building or gutting a house in Utah, these are the ten things we would get right, in the order they come up.
1. Design the network before anything else
Every other system on this list rides on the network. Decide where the equipment rack lives (a closet with power, cooling and a wall you can drill), and run a hardwired Ethernet line to every access point location, every TV, the office, the theater, the garage and the exterior for cameras. WiFi is for phones. Everything that doesn’t move gets a wire. Our whole-home network page covers the pieces.
2. Pre-wire for the things you can’t retrofit
Motorized shade pockets and power, in-ceiling speakers, keypad locations, cameras under the eaves, a conduit from the rack to the attic and to the exterior. Cable during framing costs almost nothing; the same cable after drywall costs drywall. Our pre-wire guide lists what we run in a typical custom home.
3. Pick one control platform, then buy devices that fit it
The most common failure we see is a house full of good products from ten brands and ten apps. Choose the brain first — Control4, Crestron, Savant, or Alarm.com for a simpler home — and then choose shades, locks, thermostats and audio that it natively supports. The platform decision drives every other purchase.
4. Do lighting control properly, not with smart bulbs
Smart bulbs die the moment someone flips the wall switch. Real lighting control means the dimmers in the wall are the smart part — Lutron RadioRA 3 or HomeWorks, or Control4 lighting — with engraved scene keypads at the doors so guests never need an app. Decide this before the electrician orders switches, because the wiring for a keypad is not the wiring for a three-way switch.
5. Plan shades with the window package
Motorized shades need a pocket or a valance, power at the head of every window, and a decision about fabric openness that changes how the room feels at noon. Get the shade company, the window supplier and us in the same conversation before windows are ordered. Retrofit shades are fine; retrofit shades that look built-in are not possible.
6. Put the equipment where it can be serviced
Not in a crawl space, not behind the water heater, not in a sealed cabinet with no airflow. A proper rack in a closet with a door, a dedicated circuit, a UPS and room to grow. The best systems we take over from other installers are ruined by a closet nobody can stand in.
7. Give the house two paths to the internet
When cameras, locks, thermostats and the alarm all live on the network, an outage is a blind spot. Fiber or cable as the primary, and a 5G backup or Starlink as the second WAN. The gateway fails over by itself; you find out from a notification, not from a dark house.
8. Treat security as part of the system, not a separate box
The alarm should arm as part of the Goodnight scene and disarm the lights on when you come home. Cameras should show on the touchscreens and the TV. That only happens when the security system is chosen alongside the automation platform. A national alarm company’s panel bolted on afterwards rarely talks to anything. See monitored alarms for how we integrate it.
9. Insist on documentation you own
10. Budget for the programming, not just the hardware
The gear is the visible part of the bill. The value is in the scenes, the schedules, the permissions and the two follow-up visits after you’ve lived in the house and know what you actually want. A proposal that is all hardware and no programming hours is a house full of devices, not a smart home.
Building right now? The order matters. Items 1 through 5 have to be decided before framing is done; the rest can follow. One free walkthrough of the plans with us and your builder settles most of it in an hour.
Items 1 through 10 are the checklist; the design is the rest. Our smart home systems in Utah page shows how the pieces become one system, and if a cinema is on the plans, our Park City home theater design service should be in the room before framing.
Shield Low Voltage designs, pre-wires and programs smart home systems for new construction and remodels across the Wasatch Front and Back, from Lehi to Park City.