Design
I put a nice keypad in a mudroom once. It was on the plan, on the wall, dead center, exactly where the drawing said.
Then the family moved in and hung a coat rack on the wall by the door. The door swung open and covered the keypad. Every day, all winter, coats hung over it.
They stopped using it in a week. The plan was right. The wall was wrong.
A print shows you rooms. It does not show you how people move.
Before I place anything, I walk the house the way the family will. In from the garage, drop the keys, through the kitchen, to the stairs. Down the hall to the bedrooms. Out to the patio and back.
Everywhere I naturally slow down or reach out, that is a candidate. Everywhere I sail past without touching anything, that is not.
Doing that lap with the client is even better. Ask them to walk in like they just got home from work. Watch their hands. Their hands will tell you where the keypad goes better than any drawing.
In almost every house, the same handful of places earn one.
Anything beyond that list should have a specific reason attached to it.
Standard switch height works for almost everything. Do not get creative.
The bed keypad is the exception. It should be reachable from lying down, not standing up. Put it low, on the nightstand side, where an arm can find it without sitting up. Ask which side of the bed each person sleeps on. Then confirm it a second time at trim, because people change their minds after the furniture arrives.
Watch what will be in front of it. A console table, a trash can, a laundry basket that always lives in the same corner. Furniture wins every argument with a keypad.
If the electrician already has a gang of switches on a wall, that is where the keypad goes. In that gang.
A keypad two feet away from the switches is the worst of both worlds. Now the family has two places to look. They will use the one they already know.
Put your device where their hand already goes. That is the whole trick.
Every house has a dark trip somebody makes regularly. It is different in every family.
Getting the kids at night. Letting the dog out at five in the morning. Coming home late without waking anybody. A bathroom trip through a hallway with no window.
I ask about it directly. What do you do in this house in the dark?
The answer usually places one keypad and one scene. That single pair of decisions gets used more than everything else in the job put together.
Locations drift. Doors get reversed in framing. Cabinets grow. An island moves eighteen inches and now your keypad is behind a stool.
So I confirm every location twice: once before drywall, once before engraving. The second one is a two minute walk with a piece of tape and a marker. Stick tape on every wall where a keypad is going and walk the house with the client.
They will move one or two. They always do. Moving tape costs nothing. Moving an engraved keypad in painted drywall is a bad afternoon.
I used to keep that step in my head. Then I would forget it on job three of a busy week. Now it lives on the pre-build checks that come out of TrimOut, so it is not up to my memory.
Stand where a person would stand. Close your eyes. Reach for the wall.
If your hand lands on the keypad, it is in the right place. If you have to open your eyes and look for it, move it.
That test takes five seconds and it has saved me more callbacks than anything else I do at design time.