• Drains in the floor so you just hose everything down
• Solar Closet: It's a small, well-insulated room with lots of thermal mass (water is best), and a large triple glazed south facing window of about 30sq ft. Hook it into your heating system, and you can do away with the furnace (There's a guy up in Calgary with one, and so long as he gets 15 hours of sunshine every 2 weeks over winter; he can keep his house at 70F all the time, with no furnace or other heating.)
• Stirling engine to produce power: A Stirling engine needs only a heat differential to produce power. So one side could be attached to a solar closet, the other side connected to something underground that stays cooler. Unfortunately, you'd have to build your own Stirling engine and it would be pretty big.
• Put in a Stonehenge feature, ie, some quirky thing where one day a year the sun hits a photocell and lights up a scale model of the Eiffel tower or something.
• Definitely need one wall setup to be used as the junk drawer.
• Appliances that are Internet enabled.
• Drive-up window for the pizza delivery boy, FedEx, etc.
• Easy access to smoke alarms.
• Dilbert might be sick of the noise his neighbors make. He might record it and then play it back through loudspeakers directed at the source of the original racket, with a slight delay, amplified. It would be fun to see how long it would take them to recognize their own arguments, crying baby, yowling cat or squawking bird.
• Foam insulate the entire foundation and use it as a heat sink. (I'm not sure that what means.)
• Exercise equipment connected to generators, for selling energy back to the grid.
• Bathroom: Zigzag the hot water pipe behind the mirror in the wall so that the mirror doesn't fog up.
• Retractable Christmas/Holiday lights so your neighbors don't laugh at you in June when they see your lights are still on your house.
• Use the central computer/electronics room to warm water pipes.
• Totally stainless steel kitchen counters that all drain to a sink. When you're done cooking (making a mess) cleanup consists of hosing it down, and then pushing all the debris to the sink-disposal with a simple squeegy-like device. Cleanup of nearly any mess takes all of 15 seconds.
• The gadget I would have would be Lutron's Radio RA outlets. From various controls, or from the car, or by phone (depend on how complex you want to get), you can turn on all, or some of the lights in the house. Check out Radio RA at www.lutron.com.
• Motion-sensor cat toy.
• A system to get materials from the kitchen to the outside compost heap without going outside.
• Commercial ironing machine
• Toddler dining area that's easy to hose down.
• UPS backup system so he never has to reset his clocks.
• It's crazy to warm your house to 70 degrees while cooling your refrigerator to the temperature outdoors, at least on cold days. Is there some way to bring the outside cooling to the rear of the fridge without making the house cold?
