Wire it once, properly
In a house of any size, the highest-value work is structured cabling: runs terminated in one place, labelled, tested, and documented, feeding access points that were positioned from a floor plan rather than guessed. Everything else — storage, cameras, automation — gets easier and cheaper once that spine exists.
Storage that scales past a subscription
Multi-terabyte photo and video libraries, machine-learning datasets, and years of project files do not belong on a plan that raises its price annually. A ZFS-based server sized for real growth, with snapshots and off-site backup, costs once and stays yours. We size it for what you actually store rather than for a spec sheet.
Handover you can hand to someone else
Every build ends with documentation good enough for a different engineer to pick up cold. Nobody is locked in here, which is exactly why people stay.