I’ve been using SmartThings for a number of years now. For several months, I’d found that I would leave for work, get halfway to the office, and realize I had no idea if I’d closed the garage door when I left. When you get 20 minutes away and have to drive back to look, it’s pretty disruptive. The garage door was only open once, early on, and I had only been a few minutes away. In attempt to stem this problem, I had tried to create a new routine: Back out of the garage, watch the garage door close completely (causing the event to more likely register in my memory), and then drive off. This helped some, but there were times I was just not sure.

For Christmas in December 2015, my wife bought me a SmartThings hub and a door contact sensor. Her thinking was that I could put the sensor on the garage door, and I’d at least be able to check the status of the garage door remotely. By the time we left her parents’ house to head back to Florida a few days later, I had assembled a list of Amazon items that would not only allow me to set up a home security system, but open or close the garage door remotely as well. In her words, she had created a monster.