For over a decade my wife and I (and most recently our daughter) have been holidaying across the many regions of Scotland.

This year, after a few years of pondering and discussing, we’ve made the decision to change our lives and take the first major step towards realizing a dream by selling our house in the East of England, intentionally becoming homeless, and travelling to find our forever dream somewhere in the North East of Scotland.

What do you do when you have appliances housed in an external detached garage that you want notifying of upon their completion, yet they’re too old to be natively capable and you have a fervent dislike of manufacturer shipped IoT? You build your own with HomeAssistant (HA) and Zigbee devices, of course!

My washing machine and tumbledryer live a few steps away from my house in a detached garage to attempt to mask some of the whiney noise they generate and to make more room in my relatively small kitchen. Naturally, every time I put a load of washing on I either check it before it’s finished and forget about it or forget about it entirely until a few hours later.