In this 2025 smart home tour, I walk you through the “brains” of my setup and how I’ve been retrofitting a normal house into a privacy-first, cloud-free(ish) Home Assistant system. A big chunk of it lives in my office—radio frequency gear, integrations, and an AI entity I’m training named Lorelai. The whole point is to move past the current Alexa/Echo experience and get something more intelligent, more usable, and ultimately more local so I’m in control of my data. I show the kinds of automations I actually love: the ones I forget about because they just blend into daily life—like closet lights that come on automatically and stay super dim at night. I also demo how I use visual dashboards as a centralized hub for major systems: weather alerts, lighting, water usage trends, and estimated cost. Down in the “basement storage chaos,” I’ve got networking dedicated to security cameras and power monitoring on circuits (including pool circuits), so I can see what the house is pulling at any moment. Outside at the pool, I tie in chemical readings (WaterGuru), a robot vacuum (my “Chloe” dolphin), and a pool dashboard for temperature and power. I even chat with Lorelai for status and recommendations—because the endgame is simple: fewer cloud dependencies, more resilience during outages, and a home that still works when big platforms don’t.