My new tank and all the equipment has arrived. In the end I decided to get an Aqua Oak 310 , it is much better looking than the larger aquarium brands. The stand is make from solid oak and treated with a wax finish. The aquarium comes apart into three main parts the stand, tank and cover. To my great relief my floor is absolutely level at the position where the aquarium should go.
After my wife told me I should stop waiting for a bigger house and just go ahead and get an aquarium, I have spent better part of half a year researching equipment, fish and plants and developing this WordPress plugin. I have not had a fish tank for over 20 years and a lot of things have changed since then.
The biggest change is probably the lighting, were LED lights now are taking over. Annoyingly most advice on lighting is still talking about light levels in terms of the old tubes. It took me many evening of reading before I was sure about how many lumen I should have to reach medium light levels for my tank. The goal is to have a low tech heavily planted tank. In the end I decided to with the TMC GroBeam 1500 it looks to be good quality and should be easy to setup inside the hood. I ordered two lights to begin with and will likely buy a third one once the tank is acclimatized.
I decided to go with an external filter. The main reason being to avoid having to lift the filter from the tank every time I do maintenance of the filter.