BIG project, I need your help.

I have a big project I'm planning on working on over the next few months. In short, I want to make all the lights in my house remote-control activated. The first approach I thought of was to hardwire infrared sensors into the light switches.

However, I know infrared has pretty limited range, and I'd ideally like to be able to reach all the light switches in the house from any point in the house (i.e. a range of about 30 feet, through walls). So my first question is what medium should I use for this? I'm thinking radio, right now, but I don't know if there are better options.

Second Uh, how would I do this? I don't expect a step-by-step guide, but basically I don't know anything yet about building hardware. This isn't an easy project by any means, but I don't think it's outside of my scope of ability, if I can have some resources to learn how to do it. Any suggestions for websites that might have some useful info would be much appreciated.

My first step in starting this is to choose a medium to learn about and research, and unfortunately I don't have a presence on any tech-related forums, so FIG is my first step in this. Woot woot. And I know that there do exist remote controlled light switches, but those are expensive and the fun of this is actually creating it myself.

Well, I was going to suggest those home automation kits that plug into the power jack between your ac power and your lamps and let you control things via pc/internet, but that was before I read your last paragraph. You know those x10 kits aren't that expensive. I happened to be looking into those kinds of things because I want to be able to turn on my AC over the internet before I get home.

I think you're being pretty ambitious to want to set up what you described from scratch but good luck to you. If I find anything that would be of help to you I'll post it.

That's a hell of a project dude.

Is this your own house or your parents' house?

I'll see what I can dig up for you, I'm pretty good at shit like this too, so I may be able to give you some pointers

Parent's house, so I'll have about two months to at least figure out how to do it.

My budget is nonexistent ($5 in my bank account as of this morning... fucking Father's Day...) so I'm willing to get as ghetto[=http//www.angelfire.com/80s/sixmhz/rcphone.html]as ghetto with this as possible.

X10 and its ilk is really the only way to do something like this. Attempting to "engineer" something without engineering ability and an abundance of parts will almost certainly cost more over time and perform worse than X10. X10 gear is relatively inexpensive, and once you have the controller, the individual modules can be purchased as needed.