Guardian Appointment

For those who are not indoctrinated into the Ryan Blog-verse, the Guardian appointment is the time you decide where you place the wiring of your house.  This does not include the electricity, but outlets and things can be effected by your choices.

We decided early on that if we were going to have our TVs mounted in certain areas, and we would rather have those pre-wired than to go back and change them.   If we change our minds on the locations, we will have to put nice artwork there!

Guardian offers so many options for wiring, some were not things we were considering, like the house-wide vacuum system.  It looked cool, but it just didn't seem necessary!   We also passed on the house audio system they offered.   If you have been in a model home recently, they have a multi-zone audio system installed, and it's pretty cool honestly.  It obviously is not a free feature, so I am guessing most people do not install one.  We seriously considered it, but I will say Guardian was really honest about when a system like that would be used and we thought it didn't meet our needs exactly.

To expand upon that, when you buy these sort of packages, you relinquish a certain level of control.  For example, they offered 3 types of speakers that they would install, which I do think were reasonable priced, but that means you cannot shop around for other options, and there are a lot of speaker brands out there!   The same with the house-wide audio system.  If we both listened to a lot of music or NPR while we were moving about the house, that would be ideal in my opinion.  The same song or show would be playing and you wouldn't need to deal with an iPod and headphone cords everywhere...but we were installing speakers and things more for movie and sports watching, so playing the same thing through multiple zones in the house didn't seem like something we were ever going to do at least not very often.

So we ended up getting pre-wire in several areas of the house, and we will install the speakers over time.  We also liked this option, because it did not make a whole lot of sense to wrap things like that into a mortgage.  Guardian was helpful with us being creative on how we want to use certain areas of the house, and we ended up having a lot of pre-wired areas.   In the end we think we won't regret that, but in this era with so many wireless options it did give us pause!    We did have a lot of data lines installed for smart tvs, since we know now that the Roku we have that is wired is much more reliable than the wireless one.  In the end if we don't use it it won't be the end of the world.  We really only have one data port in the home office as we expect to use our devices wirelessly most of the time.

If anyone is going through this process too, let me know what you decided to do!  I felt like this was the hardest decision given how fast technology changes.