Connecting wireless speakers throughout house

Hello, I have a question. I was wondering if it is possible to have a laptop play music to speakers located throughout the house. I would like to use a laptop as a base station which would do this. I'm really wondering what types of hardware or network devices that are available like this. I would prefer for them to go through my 802.11 instead of using their own frequency.

Other things I'd like to look into is having the laptop control lights and other random controls. I may consider programming a microcontroller to receive a wireless signal and turn on the oven or something like that.



This is something optional I also think would be cool. I would prefer to have all the speakers be wireless with a wired option so I could connect some speakers to each other. For example one speaker upstairs may get good reception, so the others connect to it and disable their wireless.