Up here in the Highlands, between the rivers and the bay, salt air works on everything and the storms that hurt are the nor'easters. Your house sits on the house outside the mapped floodplain, built in 2016 on ground that changed hands the autumn before, set over a finished basement with a theatre, a bedroom suite and the mechanical room, plus a garage, a covered porch, a composite deck on a pressure-treated frame and a concrete patio running back to the pool. What the builder did well shows in that mechanical room: zoned hydronic heat, separate cooling for each floor, a standby generator, whole-house surge protection and a radon system.

Heat comes from a Lochinvar Knight WHN199 condensing boiler in the basement, ten years old and mid-life, feeding six zones through a Taco SR506 panel, Taco circulators and an Amtrol Extrol expansion tank. The same boiler fires the Lochinvar Squire indirect tank installed that October, so heat and hot water share one machine and both stop if it does. Cooling is two Comfortmaker air handlers in the attic paired with two International Comfort Products condensers in the side yard from 2016 and 2017; the condensers will want replacing a few years before the handlers. A Mitsubishi Electric mini-split runs on its own, and two Aprilaire 800 steam humidifiers in the attic soften the winter air.

Water comes in at the back gate past the meter and main shutoff, through a Watts pressure reducing valve and a whole-house filter. A Zoeller sump and a sewage ejector keep the basement dry and draining, and an old Rheem electric heater sits disconnected behind the stairs. Power lands in two Square D Homeline panels in the garage, with a Square D surge device on the basement wall; a Generac Guardian generator in the side yard and its transfer switch by the side gate carry the house through an outage. Control4 thermostats on five zones and an ecobee in the living room run through a Control4 system that leans on its dealer.

The kitchen is built around a Thermador gas range, with a wall oven and beverage fridge, a washer and gas dryer in the mudroom, and a new outdoor kitchen with grill, griddle, sink and fridge. The pool runs on Pentair gear, an IntelliFlo variable-speed pump from 2023, EasyTouch controls, a heater, a filter and an IntelliChlor salt cell. The outside of the house, roof, siding, windows and gutters, was not photographed on the capture visit, so the envelope is on record by name and build year only.

A gas emergency shutoff switch sits at the attic access, a Kidde combination detector hangs at the bottom of the basement stairs, and a plug-in CO detector stands in the mechanical room. This house burns gas in the boiler, the range, the dryer and the fireplace, and its house-wide smoke and carbon monoxide detection is not documented.