You can do it with RF. You can use a simple 4 bit holtek encoder / decoder pair and take outputs from decoder, feed it to a uln2003 and from the uln2003 drive the relay. you can activate the encoder using just 2 pins - 1 for setting 1 bit high or low and 1 for clocking the encoder(giving it a single pulse).
I know its not the best of explanation but then i'm just a bit ahead of you i suppose. I started in the same spot a year back (and i didn't know a triac back then) 
cheers,
Pracas