You know you can go to your local Best Buy (a home-grown Minnesota favorite) or Home Depot and find all sorts of smart devices for your home. Smart light bulbs, thermostats, locks, irrigation controllers, and much more are easily found up and down the aisles. So why not put them together your own smart home?

Of course, you can take this approach. But prepare to think like a home technology integrator like Lelch Audio-Video. We like to explain it this way: If you are reasonably handy, there’s a lot you can do with the right tools and materials from Home Depot to fix or upgrade your home. On the other hand, you may not want to take on a complete remodel of your home.

When it comes to something like smart lighting, you may want to add some intelligent light somewhere, like an outside light that you can program to come on at sunset. Or maybe you can put in a few smart bulbs that you can dim and control with your smartphone or with Alexa on your Echo smart speaker.

But doing lighting right is both art and science. The art is in achieving the right aesthetic effect, and the science is in having the right amount of lighting and easy and consistent control of your home’s illumination. To that end, we’d like to point out a few common mistakes we often see when lighting projects are not fully baked. The good news: Lelch Audio-Video is a certified Lutron smart lighting installer, and we can help you avoid these mistakes in your Woodbury home.