The concepts of smart home and Internet of Things (IoT) are becoming reality. Although the basic principles of this new communication paradigm are well defined, yet the practice lacks knowledge of the difficulties related to its practical realization and usage. This paper aims at highlighting some hands-on problems and solutions when implementing a simple and yet very comprehensive and easy to use smart-home solution. Our design is based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication with the peripheral devices and an Android central hub for coordination. The proposed solution gains the advantages provided by the Google Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), in order to provide geographical flexibility for the client's application and networking. The paper provides testing results related to the development and verification of the smart home solution.