Kitchen/house

Ok, my last post was in October, which coincidentally is when I started my new job. Since then, I haven't had time to really work on the house other than trying to clean up the yard and put my sorry excuse of a garden in. (I should be mowing now instead of posting on this blog.) I did order and finally start to build our Kitchen/HTPC. The plan is to have a touchscreen PC in the kitchen to use as a central point for receipes, weather, security, surfing and controlling media content for the rest of the house. Last year while I was researching for the kitchen PC, there was hardly anything out there. A year later, it appears that a lot more people have had the same idea as me. Touchscreen computing. (lots of links)

While remodeling, I made sure I ran cables from one side of the room to the other including, HDMI, VGA, speaker, coax and ethernet--just so we can run the media center on kitchen PC and to channel media to the big screen. Yes, I know there is thing called wireless, and I am sure I will be integrating more wireless as I go As this projects keeps going on, it keeps morphing into different ideas. We were thinking traditional kitchen setup with table and that's it, but now we are thinking more of an internet cafe look and function. The west wall now has sheetrock up, and now we are going to make the whole wall a bookcase. Between the wife and me, we have tons of books. Right now, though, they are all in storage, and we would like them available. In front of the west wall, we will be building a bar/computer desk that will hold at least two computers; the bar/kitchen table will have the kitchen computer with the touchscreen. The idea is to have retractable screens and keyboards so we can all sit around for dinner and also use it for our media-centric family.

Just a small update for now, and I will be posting more since I now have my computer up and running. I will post more pictures as I go. But for now, I really need to go mow some grass.