My partner and I have a teenager who is doing teenager things and since we are out of the house so much for work we would like to set up a few cameras to monitor who exactly is coming and going while we are away.

Ideally we are looking for one camera for the front and back door each and 1-2 for the main living areas in the house.

I’m not sure what features make sense for us, motion detection would be nice for the external cameras but we have 2 cats so I feel like our phones would explode with notifications if we had that feature enabled inside.

Being able to speak through the cameras from our phones would be great but not necessarily a must have.

I would prefer not to pay a subscription fee on principle but I also recognize there may be some limitations in recording capacity with a local set up unless we build a server to store footage? maybe? I could use some enlightenment here.

The house is a rental so drilling a bunch of holes through walls is probably out of the question and we live in Canada so leaving a window open to run cables through in the winter is not a great option. I think we can pretty easily use wired cameras indoors but I’m not sure what the best course of action is for the exterior cameras.

I’m sure I am missing some information so please feel free to ask for more details if required, otherwise I appreciate any help in the right direction.