Before the current era.

The flagship project of my AV era: designing and installing the complete entertainment system for Millstone Social, an elevated sports bar in Richmond, Kentucky. The system runs 25 high-definition displays fed by DirecTV receivers over structured cabling with video balun distribution, plus a central projector and screen for major events and a full venue audio system.

The part I am proudest of is the control layer: custom iPad programming that lets bar staff drive every display, channel, and volume zone from one screen with zero technical knowledge. A system this size succeeds or fails on whether the people running the venue can actually use it, and this one runs nightly.

Designed and implemented multiple commercial conference room systems: displays, audio, source switching, and control, integrated so a meeting starts with one button instead of fifteen minutes of cable roulette. Conference rooms are unforgiving AV work because the client uses them daily and every failure is public. These projects taught me to design for the person walking into the room, not for the installer who already knows where everything is.

Installed motorized TV mounts and lifts in residential and commercial settings: displays that rise from furniture, fold from ceilings, or articulate into position on command, wired into the room’s control system. The mechanical side demands precise mounting and load work; the interesting side is the integration, making motion a seamless part of a scene instead of a separate remote.

Volume display installation work across homes and businesses: wall mounts of every size, concealed wiring, source configuration, and the finish quality that separates professional installation from a bracket and hope. This was the foundation of my field years, where I learned that craftsmanship in the boring parts is what clients actually remember.

Field AV work that did not fit neatly into homes or standing bars: one-off events and specialty builds, each with its own constraints. A wedding reception in a two-story barn venue needed a fast-fold projection screen and a full PA system rigged for a single night, built to disappear into the space until it was time to use it.

A custom auction and event trailer took the opposite approach: a gloss black build with a flip-down exterior display and outdoor speakers mounted under the awning, meant to run at whatever site it towed to. A boutique hotel meeting room rounded out the work, wired for screen mirroring so presenters could connect and share without touching a cable.

Before the lab became the platform described in the current case studies, it was a series of first builds, each one documented as I learned it: standing up Dell PowerEdge servers on a type-one hypervisor, designing and operating an EqualLogic SAN (since decommissioned), self-hosting Nextcloud as a personal cloud, Jellyfin as a media library, Frigate as an NVR, Vaultwarden as a password manager, Netdata for monitoring, and Veeam for real backups.

Those original write-ups live on my first portfolio site. They mark the era when I stopped renting infrastructure and started running it.