Builidng Houses

Builidng Houses

who likes to take there time to build from scratch houses and community lots?

 

I enjoy building & decorating houses more than playing the game. Most of my time is spent on designing.

 

I used to love to build and design houses on TS1. I am still trying out and getting the hang of the tools on TS2, so when I build the houses are very simple. I am having the most trouble with the roofs!! I can't get them to look the way I'd like them to!! And I have yet to figure out how the dormer window tool works so my houses can have dormers.

 

I seem to spend most of my time building houses now, because the rate at which my Sims spawn has become such that my family bin is always clogged with people needing a home. It doesn't help that I'm also running rather short on ideas for unique-looking homes. There's only some many variations one can have on the rectangular box for < $30K.

 

That describes my game play perfectly! lol It seems to take all night to build a house or a community lot. I did put a few of the pre-built homes in my neighborhood because I was afraid it would be next year before I had a reasonably populated town for my sims. I, too, spent some time with those roofs and just leave it on auto roofing now. I spent a whole evening with the dormers before I got them to work the way I'd envisioned. I found them irritating because I couldn't delete them..I had to hit the undo over and over. I do like them though..they make a perfect bathroom space or kid's room. I found the drop stairs frustrating to get lined up from the exact floor tile on the floor above to hit exactly where I wanted them to on the floor below. I've finally decided I'll download a few houses. With so few options for decorating or landscaping, I realized I'd have to redo most of them anyway when expansion packs came out. I don't even put much effort into decorating at this point. If it's a farmhouse I put one wood flooring throughout, mediterranean gets a tile floor run throughout it, etc. I pick one wallpaper for each house. I decided to just wait until I have some options. Laying first floor flooring with a foundation is my biggest gripe! lol I have to do it almost square by square. I get a level of floor that seems to hover above it so that I can't fill it with shift or control click. I don't like the terrain coloring options. I want a lighten and darken option. All of the grass is just soooo green! lol I can't decide if I truely dislike these building tools or if I'm just more comfortable with the TS1 ones. I'm usually worn out when I get through with a home. I feel like I've layed every brick and hammered every nail.

 

I wish there was a salt button. You know, sow salt over the yard so weeds wouldn't grow there anymore. I actually find these games rather educational, though. Until I started playing these, I had no idea that "normal" people did so many things in such a grossly inefficient and inferior manner.

 

I'm kind of a fanatic when it comes to this... I LOVE creating every house that I've ever lived in, making perfect scale replicas ( well not purfectly decorated cos that's a little harder ) of everywhere I've been. Blocks of flats, my parents house, my current house, my brother's house... even houses from movies etc.

Average buildtime depends on how much I plan it. I went straight into my parents house the other day and realised that I'd made it too large, so planned and rebuilt it. Then it was too close to the sidewalk, so I rebuilt it.. and finally finished it after about 5 hours ( BIG HOUSE, chocka with furniture ).

Average build times are around 1-4 hours, depending on how particular I get with furnishings. I have never half built a house and come back to it. Once I start I do not stop until it is perfect.

When I started creating my hometown I put all the premade houses around the place to make the town look a little 'lived in'.. but gradually they are all being trashed and making way for my custom houses. Most of the premade houses have designs that look good from the outside, but aren't really that functional.

 

My neighborhood tends to look like a trailer park and peasant village with a few mansions on the other side, because on 20K, you really can't get much in the way of variety. It's only once you pass about the 100K line that you can really build anything worthwhile, so I don't tend to have a lot of mid-range houses that I actually built. By the time I actually have Sims able to afford one, they're already comfortably settled into their trailer and I figure I can just hold out a bit longer.

 

That's where I ... well cheat a little. Instead of working my way up in the world to afford the godly expensive replica houses I make, I simply grant the inhabitants a fat load of cash and build outta their budget.

Sure this is cheating, but I rarely play as these families, as the fun is the house creation not the use of the house in this case.

So I have replica houses and functional houses. I generally play using the functional houses because I am actually builing a life for the characters in there, rather than creating houses caught in space and time. So ya, replica houses have families with massive budgets, and 'playable' houses go the hard yards.

 

Heh, I have large houses like that, but they tend to be some future aspirational goal rather than inhabited by any family at all. Every so often, though, some Sim strikes it rich in a "fat bonus" chance card, and it's time to move into the shiny house.

 

Rarely do I build a house from scratch. It always ends up looking like a square or an octagon and being too big/small for items to work efficiently.

 

That's more or less what happens to me. With my terrible house-designing skills, any building project more ambitious than a 15-30k trailer tends to end up looking drab and barely functional. No function nor form. I don't believe I've built any house from scratch on anything bigger than the smallest 2x3 lot.

 

house

I find that you can make a relativly decent house for only 40k but that's without adding furniture before new sims move in!

 

You can make a pretty nice house on 40K, but the problem is, Sim families start with 20K, so unless you cheat, in which case the cost of a house has become irrelevant, you're going to have to make do with a much crummier house. And it's a bit tricky to create a 20K house equipped with everything a Sim needs without making it come out as a generic, often mostly unpainted, box.

 

I build

I love building. I have a knack for space management and can house a 4 person family on a 3x3 lot with phone, TV, couch, beds, fridge, oven, and toiletries for under 18k. That's assuming I go bare minimum (1 floor, no double bed, cramped space, no yard work).

As for money i create a small undecorated lot called "Pauper's Lot" and use it to give money to those families that are going to occupy my Uphill crowd (where my rich families are). I save them, move them from Pauper's Lot and move them into a huge, swank home. I like jumping from family to family, playing both rich and poor, barely making ends meet and living in luxery.

I also made my entirely new neighborhood. I like it way better than the premade neighborhoods. I know the characters (except the Townies, whom I kinda hate) and am invested in watching how they interact. I feel a part of their successes because I made each one, picked their interests, and designed their living space. I enjoy this aspect of the game.

 

Meh, that's not bad. I squeezed a family of 5: husband, wife, and three children, one of each age category, into the small 2x3 lot into a house with all the essentials. I don't, however, really consider TV an essential. Even in my richer families who can afford the TV, few of them ever watch it. I suppose this may reflect my personal bias IRL also, as I never watch TV either. The fun value of low-end TVs is crappy anyway, and when you can't afford WALLS, you can't afford the NOISE either. TV also lacks the "locking" behavior: If you instruct a Sim to watch it, he won't STAY there, he'll keep getting up and wandering off. And some other Sim will probably turn the TV off while he's trying to watch.

I tend to jump from family to family also, but with the exception of the Maxis prebuilts, all of my families are selfmade. I do, however, marry them together to afford the bigger homes. If I'm out to create a rich family, I'll generally start with only a single Sim: Lone sims earn money very quickly realtime, especially, as mentioned in my other thread, knowledge sims. Once they've maxed out their skills and clawed their way to the top of the career ladder with them, they're usually packing a net worth of about 30-50K. Marry them off to a similar sim, and we're ready to move to the upscale housing and actually start a family.

As a side benefit, the rich families "living in luxury" actually have the feel of a rich, upscale dynasty, since they're not simply underskilled peons handed a wad of cash via the "lottery". Large homes tend to lack the low-micromanagement, high-efficiency effect of a small house, so the thing you do, simply handing a new family a ton of cash and moving them in, tends to just slow them down in achieving actual success, and tends to leave them slightly dependent on aforementioned handouts unless you really went overboard. Money doesn't make good people, I say. Plus there's the warm, shiny memories of actual earned success for them to talk about. The "Brag" social doesn't work too well when you don't actually have anything to brag about.

I rather liked the premade families, but was largely indifferent to the actual neighborhood. So I carefully and painstakingly packed them up and moved them into my much larger and more spacious neighborhood just so I could watch everything interact with everything else. It was tricky to do.

Personally, I'm indifferent to the adult townies, and negative towards the others. The adult townies are still contributing, albeit marginal, members of the community: They give the Romance sims something to do without having to turn the entire community *I* built into a massive train wreck, unless I want them to. Sometimes the better townies manage to marry their way into an actual family. I actually now have a family that's composed of the townies that married it into the realm of controllable characters, then broke up spectacularly because it amused me to do so and paired off with each other. They've subsequently become rich in a series of chance cards, so now they're upscale members.

The child townies, on the other hand, I loathe, because they're phone stalkers. Once they start to become really annoying, they meet a gruesome demise. The teen townies aren't quite as aggravating, and I mostly ignore them: The teen stage is much longer, so I actually have a significant internal population of my own to interact with, and teens have their own aspirations, so the occasional townie teen doesn't become a want clogger like child townies do. They're also less prone to being phone stalkers! Teens only call for their friends, unlike the children who call for TOTAL STRANGERS. Plus, really undesirable ones can be driven off with the "negative" interactions, unlike the children, which cannot engage in negative interaction with non-children. With child stage lasting a mere 5 days, it's over all too quickly for my in-game children to really have significant interactions with other children.