What to expect from a smart home installation

The question owners ask first is how long this takes, and the honest answer is a schedule rather than a number. A single room and a whole house are different projects, and most of the calendar is spent somewhere other than your living room. Here is the order it runs in, from the first phone call to the day we hand you the remote, with the time each stage takes and the thing that usually stretches it.

End to end, a dedicated room such as a theater typically runs four to eight weeks from signed contract to final calibration, with the walk and the proposal ahead of that. A whole-house project in a build runs on the builder’s calendar and is measured in months, because our stages interleave with framing, drywall and trim rather than replacing them.

The site walk

An hour or two in the house, at no cost. We look at the rooms you actually use, how the walls and ceilings are built, where the panel is, how wire would have to travel, and what is already installed that is worth keeping. If the house is still a set of plans, we walk the plans instead.

We also ask what you want the system to do, in plain language. Lights that come up when you pull in. One remote instead of five. Cameras you can check from the road. That conversation shapes the design more than any product list does, and it is the part homeowners tend to underestimate. The one thing that delays this stage is calendars: it is worth getting everyone who will use the system into the same walk.

The proposal

The design comes back as one document, typically a week or two after the walk. Room by room: what goes in, what it does, and one price. Not a range, and not a number that moves after you sign because we guessed at the scope. Getting that right is our job during the walk, not yours during the install.

You should be able to read it without a glossary. One price covers the whole smart home automation design, including the parts you will never see. When a line gets cut, we note where the wire will be sitting in case you want it back in a few years.

Pre-wire, if the walls are still open

On new construction and gut remodels our first day on site is a wire day, and it lands early — after framing, before insulation and drywall. It is days of work, but the date is the builder’s to set, and it is the stage most likely to move because everything ahead of it moves. We coordinate with the builder and the electrician so our runs go in on time: speaker locations, keypad heights, backing behind the televisions, camera angles, conduit for whatever is not invented yet.

This is the stage that is hard to redo. Moving a keypad while the studs are open costs an hour. Moving it later costs a wall. In a finished house we work with what the construction allows and design around it, which is a different job with a different set of compromises.

The rack

While the house is being wired, the equipment rack is built in our shop over a few days. Gear mounted, cable cut to length and labeled at both ends, power and network laid out, the whole thing powered up and run before it is ever loaded into a truck. The clock here belongs to the equipment lead times rather than to the labor.

The slow, loud part of the job happens somewhere other than your basement, and what arrives is a rack a technician can still work inside ten years from now. That matters more than it sounds like it should.

Device install

Then the visible week. Keypads, touchscreens, shades, speakers, displays, cameras, access points. We work standard hours, cover floors and furnishings, and put each room back before we leave it.

Scope drives the calendar. A couple of rooms is a day or two. A whole house runs into weeks, usually staged, so parts of the system come alive while the rest is still going in. In a build this stage waits on paint and flooring, which is the most common reason a date moves late in a project.

Programming

This is where a pile of hardware becomes a system. Scenes get named and set, keypad buttons get assigned, schedules and away behavior get written, and the pieces start talking to one another so that one button does what five used to.

Then we test it against the way you said you live: each scene, each button, what happens when the power blinks, what happens when the internet drops. This stage usually takes longer than the install week, and it is the one that decides whether you like the system or merely own it.

The walkthrough

We hand over the remote in person, in one session. You drive, we watch. If something is confusing, that is a design problem on our side rather than a training problem on yours, and we would rather change it than teach around it.

You keep documentation for the system as built, written for a person rather than for a technician. The crew that installed it is the crew that answers when you call.

The first weeks

New systems get tuned. A dim level is too high, a schedule fires ten minutes late, someone decides the mudroom keypad should do something else entirely. We expect a handful of those calls in the first few weeks, and they are the kind of change we make remotely.

After that it settles into the background, which is the whole point of the exercise. The workmanship warranty and the manufacturer warranties are written into the proposal, and you have our support for as long as you own the system.

What to hold us to

One price, agreed before we start. A schedule you hear about before it moves. A rack someone else could service. Documentation that stays at the house. And a system the rest of your family can run without calling you at work.

If an integrator cannot tell you what happens in which order, and roughly how long each part takes, that is worth finding out before the wire goes in the walls.

— Daniel Alon, founder, IntegrateIT. Overland Park, KS. December 2025.