Nice drawing! :D I'm getting Foamy vibes from the eye emoting.

Something your critique of the kitchen brought to mind. Yeah it's a Reddit link, but it goes to something that kinda expanded my view on the monotone fad that has dominated the interior design landscape: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/comments/10njiwd/colour_theory_and_corporations/

Not go as HAM on commercial server hardware. iLO is really nice for management though...

Would you say that 15FPS is a good framerate for surveilance? Or could one get away with even less to lessen the resource requirements?

If doing CPU-based motion analysis, you could use a lower quality stream (if available from the cameras to avoid transcoding load) for motion detection, then use that to trigger recording on a higher quality stream.