Finally, after a 5-week delay, the roof framing is starting to come up.

Unfortunately, there is still no power connected to the construction site and the generator that they installed a few days ago appears to have some problems. The fact that we’re in the middle of the Christmas holidays right now doesn’t do much to help them catch up either…

We received yesterday the first interior perspective sketches from John, our architect. The designs are pretty much in line with our earlier discussions; clean, simple and elegant. They match quite well what we had in mind for the finished look of the house.

I like the open and modern, yet Asian, look of this dining area, which also reflects our recent choice of engineered hardwood for the flooring. However, a couple of things in this perspective sketch will still change. The window in the far left corner will extend further to the left, and we’ll probably add a drop lamp in the center.

The living room finish has close to the look we had in mind, although we’ll most probably choose different furniture than what’s depicted here.

There’s one crucial feature missing in this sketch of the proposed Master’s Bedroom: there are supposed to be wooden louvers covering the bottom portion of the glass, wrapping around the two sides of the bedroom exterior. Also, we feel it looks a little too "sterile" with all the white here.

The gym area looks quite good with darker flooring, and we’re reconsidering our recent choice of a lighter colored wooden laminate for the basement. The mirror on the right does make the area look larger, although we’ll need to put a more sturdy handlebar (for our daughter’s ballet practice) than what’s shown here.

Finally I got around to trying to draw the first network diagrams for The Asia House. The first one shows the general network wiring, from the incoming DSL and cable TV wiring through to the LAN wiring to each room in the house.

In addition to the DSL and cable TV lines, the house will also connected to the outside world through a wireless GSM modem, which will be used primarily to automatically send SMS messages to the house occupants in case of security incidents. The home control server is connected to the Internet through a firewall. The home control server and the media server, and in the future possibly other servers as well, are connected to the local controllers, to the touch screen controllers and to the PC’s throughout the house through a standard Ethernet LAN. The incoming phone line is connected to a PABX that we happened to have left over from a previous business, and all phones in the house are connected to the PABX such that we can conveniently dial from room to room as well. The incoming cable TV signal will in the future be combined with video generated by the media server, and with video coming from security cameras, and then distributed throughout the house. This will allow for the implementation of some pretty cool functions in the future

All the major rooms have LAN jacks for PC’s or laptops, and a wireless access point in the dining area should provide sufficient coverage outdoors. Likewise, all major rooms either have a phone, or a provision for a phone. With regards to television, we really only plan to have a TV in the guest-room-combined-TV-room for now, but there will be TV jacks in all major rooms. There will be ceiling-mounted speakers in a couple of the rooms, but we probably won’t be streaming audio to them from the media server for the next year or two, as I’ll have some work to do to implement that in a cost-effective manner.

The touch screen controllers are essentially distributed processors (based on Rabbit core modules) to which I connect intelligent LCD touch screens. These touch screens form the primary means whereby the occupants of The Asia House will interface with the home control system. The “local controllers”, as I call them, connect the server via the LAN to several auxiliary devices, which I attempt to explain on the second network diagram.

I am currently planning to utilize three local controllers, each one managing the auxiliary devices on one floor of The Asia House. Each controller handles IR communication with devices in selected rooms, reads sensors and push buttons, controls devices, and communicates (securely) with the home control server. A wireless controller (probably using Zigbee or Z-Wave) may be used in the future to control the lights in the house.

Each room that is equipped with an air conditioning unit or with a TV has an IR transceiver which can be used by the server to send signals to turn on or off the aircon, or to turn off the TV. The same transceiver can also be used to receive signals from a remote control in the room, which allows the room occupant to communicate with the server to, for example, increase the volume on piped-in audio. All bedrooms will (subsequently) be provided with a small occupancy sensor to allow the home control system to, for example, turn off the aircons if the rooms have been empty for some time, or to brighten the bathroom lights a little if the children wake up at night.

There is a water sensor in the kitchen, and another one in the downstairs laundry/kitchen area. There is one smoke sensor on each floor, centrally located near the staircase. There are also “panic buttons” behind the doors of the three main exterior entrances, which the occupants can press if they feel threatened by any visitor at the door. Finally, the home control system is also connected to external flood lights, a siren and a strobe light, which can be activated manually or automatically depending on the situation.

In addition to the local controllers on each floor, there may also be other controllers added in the future. One important controller which I intend to add relatively soon is a data acquisition module to monitor the power consumed by each electric circuit in the house. This will be an analog data acquisition board with one analog input channel per circuit, connected to inductive sensors placed around the wiring near each circuit breaker, similar to how a clamp ammeter is used. With the current consumption monitored over time, we can not only improve the way we use appliances, we can also automatically be issued a warning signal if, for example, a water heater has remained on for an unusual length of time.

We met up with Architect John the other day, and decided to make a few small changes to the house design. This is what I love about the chaotic process we have; we can make changes even during construction. This is usually very difficult in a build-to-print situation, where everything has to be decided with the contractor prior to construction.

The design of the water feature in front of the porch is now pretty much final. It’ll be about 3.5 feet deep, which should be sufficient to keep Koi fish happy (well, as happy as incarcerated fish can be, anyway). There will now be steps in both directions leaving the porch, which should make it easier when moving into the garden. We also made them narrower, to increase the water surface area of the mini-pond.

We decided to have a seating area, or working area, in the master’s bedroom instead of a balcony. The thinking was that even if we wanted to sit outside and enjoy a drink in the evening, the kitchen is on the ground floor anyway, so we might as well sit out on the deck downstairs.

We also decided on the choice of sauna. The sauna turned out to not be very expensive, and it does increase the resale value of the house quite significantly. We also managed to squeeze in a toilet in the sauna area, whereas before there was no easily accessible toilet in the basement. Outdoors, near the sauna area, we also added a staircase leading from the garden down to the patio area.

The layout of the kids’ rooms is now also pretty much final. They will both have a ship-like ladder from their rooms up to the lofts. Matthew’s room will also have a fireman’s escape pole from the loft down to his bed, which I think is pretty cool; certainly it’s something I would have enjoyed when I was a kid.

Even though the builder is having trouble with the hollow-core slabs, and we are experiencing some delays due to this, I am very pleased with the results so far. The thinner slabs resulted in perhaps half the weight compared to the traditional concrete floors they normally pour. This in turn allowed us to have a much thinner support structure. The columns will be barely noticeable once the Asia house is completed.

Most external corners in all major rooms are of glass. The columns are all placed away from the corners, often near doorways. Even the downspouts are hidden from view, as we are installing inside gutters about 1m away from the edge all around the roof, and the downspouts are embedded into the columns or inside inner walls.

Today we were finally able to walk around on the second floor, although the slabs are still not complete. I was pleased to see that the airy design is exactly as I had imagined it, even though the high ceiling is not yet visible. Here, just as in the dining and living rooms on the ground floor, we will have glass-to-glass in all corners.

We decided to not push through with having a balcony in the Master’s bedroom. It would have "cut" into the profile of the house, and caused a bit of an aesthetical issue. We decided to utilize the space for some relaxing furniture instead, and in any case we do have a deck on the ground floor.