Hi. I am afraid I may have gotten some bad advice about whole house lighting control systems. I was told I would not have to do anything different in the rough electrical wiring of the house we are building in order to use a whole house lighting control system. Well, I can see now that that is true *to a point* but it is not true for what I envisioned.

Our house is not that large, approx 3400 sq.ft., but it does have quite a lot of electrical. This is because I am the electrician and therefore am only paying for material - so more lights, fixtures, etc. really donÂt add much expense. There is one problem I thought I could solve with whole house wiring: the elimination of multiple wall switches in multi-gang boxes. For instance, at the main entrance, there are four separate lighting circuits switched from a 4-gang box on the wall next to the door. There are a number of other wall locations where there are 3 and 4-gang switches. I fear this is going to be visually unsightly. What I would like to be able to do is control all of these separate circuits from a single gang footprint without using an X-10 system.

At this point, the drywall is still not up, but will be soon. After 6 years of building this thing (we just returned from the building dept. with yet ANOTHER two-year extension!), I really donÂt have the energy to re-wire the entire house. However, I am still able to run control wires. And by the way, I also did a complete Structured Wiring job so there already is an SMC.

So my question is, what are my options (excluding X-10) for eliminating 3 or 4-gang wall switches and condensing them down to a single-gang footprint? Thank you very much for any advice.