A few more home hack ideas

Getting very close to completion of the house purchase now!

On a long drive back from a family holiday in St Ives last month I had the following ideas/thoughts. I forgot to post it at the time, but here it is:

• A house-wide CCTV system. Probably cheaper to use individual ip webcams than a composite video and separate DVR recording system. This would cover the: front door, garden, garage and alleyway behind the garden (where there is access to the back garden and car parking)
• PIR motion sensors in the alleyway, front garden, front door and inside the house in the hallway. This can be hooked into the CCTV and/or security system, as well as detecting people when they come in (potentially hooked into the automatic lighting system).
• Temperature sensors in all rooms and under stairs cupboard. This can be linked to the thermostat/central heating to allow for more efficient heating of the house.
• All equipment to run the hacked house to be hidden out the way in the under stairs cupboard (hence the temperature sensor in the cupboard). UPS compatible wiring, if I wish to add mains power cut protection later.
• Cooling system (probably temperature controlled) to vent from the under stairs cupboard into the adjacent boiler cupboard or out of the side of the house
• Run cat5 and power out to the garage (makes other ideas easier to implement)
• All the living room entertainment systems to be in shelving unit to the left of the fireplace (where the TV is going to be wall mounted). Wiring will be hidden as much as possible. Potential to have virgin media coax hidden through ceiling or floor to the cable tv box on the shelves.
• A 5 channel surround speaker system in corners of the living room and auto calibrated to balance the sound for optimum listening on the sofa, opposite the tv/fireplace.
• TV wall mounted above fireplace.
• 2 additional speakers in the kitchen running off main amp in the living room.
• A Raspberry pi running raspbmc or a silent mini-itx media centre running xbmc in living room (to replace the existing PS3 which doesn't support all media codecs).
• Google nexus 7 tablet as remote control for xbmc. Can control music playback in kitchen/living room. Can also access web based house interface with cctv, temperature monitors, lighting control, etc
• A computer controlled (from server or media pc) IR sender to act as dummy remote control. Used to control amp, tv, and other Ir media equipment in living room to provide seamless media experience

Possible ideas, but not sure about these. Probably best as separate stand alone projects

• Brewing control/monitoring in garage to control my planned micro homebrewery. Could use aebcam and Arduino connected to temperature sensors and boilers to automate the brewing process. It would appear that most of the hard coding work on this project has been started at http://brewpi.com (although this would mean buying another RaspberryPi)
• A modified roomba style Hoover with camera and remote control. Can clean carpets downstairs and monitor house/cat. Another one upstairs? Linked by WiFi to server for out of house control