Overview
When I first started playing sims, I jumped striaght into building my first house. I really didn’t want to cheat and build a mansion, but I wanted to start off small and then work my way up. This guide will cover the basics about building a small cheap house with ways on improving it and also maybe making it less dull than a boring box house. But that’s if we’re lucky.
Introduction
*Guide is pretty much finished I just wanted to publish it now so I can at least help someone out there and I will throw a few more pictures out there later*
Welcome to my guide! I’d just like to say now before we all get excited, I have been building a few starter houses recently and been trying to find ways of making them look really cool wihout using cheats. This guide could fall flat on it’s face or we could end up with some interesting creations. However, I want to ensure that the house is done on a easy budget. So without futher ado, let’s get started!
Don’t forget to use your imagination! it’s up to you how your house looks 🙂
Notes; I will be going through this process again to make sure I haven’t missed anything and I’ll put up more examples to see if I can help anyone else conserve more money. I know I’m not an expert and you may know this already, it started out as a way for me to access something to help me be reminded of what I need to do to make a house so I hope you can use it for that too!
Whichplot of land should I choose?
Sounds werid right? It kind of is, but choosing weather you want to expand the house after can be crucial for this part to. Some lands you won’t be able to fit near a road, therefore you will be late for work etc.
You can either choose a pre-set one or edit the town and choose a plot for yourself. After you’ve created your family, you can click the “…” at the botton and press edit town! this means you can put in a slot of land where you want it 🙂
The annoying thing is that the 63×63 land is the most expensive, and can also be a bugger to put down somewhere near a road. On a few occassions I’ve been late for work, but if you find a space somewhere please give us a shout :L
On the other extreme, 10×10 would be too small.. unless you built up in some sort of windmill I suppose… But does cost only $200. the default ones are roughly 19×29 which I find perfect for a bungalow. This only costs $1,200 so you will still have a fair bit of money to play about with. I am going to stick with this one for the time being.
Remember, if you don’t plan on moving, make sure you are happy with the space first. I managed to fit everything into a default house, but then my family size is a family of 2. Maybe using twinbrook wasn’t such a good idea ffor the big mansion, but you want easy road access so you can at least get to work on time (I’ve made that mistake before)
To have foundations or to not have foundations – That is the question
Foundations look nice, but can be expensive. You need to make sure you can afford to do so before you go on ahead. I will be designing some houses soon to show some foundated houses, but I’m interested to see if it works with basements too etc. Maybe we can grow a house!
It can be done, but you may want to try and build upwards, I gave myself way too much room so it looks a bit rubbish but here’s my “example”
This house was roughly $17k to build including furniture
Remember, the foundation of the house is right at the bottom (excluding basement). this means if you want a foundation later it may be harder to do (I’ve not actually tried but I will be attempting to soon). Also, be wary if you want a basement, I don’t think it worked in my experience unless you be creative with it and make a secret garden or something :L
The walls, doors and floors
Creating the rooms can be for the house can be difficult. If you do a room too large, you wiill start to lose money. If you do a room too small, they won’t have enough space for everything. I don’t like to box everything in seperate rooms. But I do my best to keep it at a 5×5 room for each room Like this:
I have a seperate room for the kitchen, bedroom, bathroom (witch is a 3×3) and living area. These are the basic paramaters of building your first house. The question is, where do we place it all?
When my girlfrined and I decided to make our house, we wanted them to enter straight into the living room. This meant we could spend less on hallways and we kept everything to attached. If you want to create our house, The big room is a 10×10. Funny enough, this will act as a living room and the kitchen. We then wanted the toilet to be a 3×3 but as an ensuite. Therefore, we placed it at the back, witch meant that when we become richer, this would lead out to the garden and possibily a barn.. Don’t ask…
*I will check parameters when I’m next on game to make sure I’m right*
The next thing we need are the doors. Doors can be a strange one. You can have different types of doors, like glass doors, wooden doors and even secret doors! The question is, what is right for you? When my girlfriend and I did this, we went for a simple door. This was cheap and cost effective, we wanted to conserve our money and we knew we were ready to change the house and expand it.
After that is the flooring and the wallpaper and the flooring. This can be the cheapest part of the entire process… Unless you want it to be pretty straight away of course (not that I have anything against wooden flooring 🙂 ) There are a few wall papers and floros that are free, different style woods etc. The wall paper doesn’t have to be so bad if you have massive floors like we had, but we wanted it to look nice! No shame in that..right? Anyway, keep an eye out for the free ones if your on a tight budget. Our houses ended up something like this…
Items and Lighting
Now you may find it hard to see the pictures above.. so did our sims.. So next we move on to lights! Note if you do the room like we have and had seperate wall paper for kitchen and living room you may want to do lights first, if your doing one room just hold shift and it will all be solved 😛 anymway moving on!
There are some really really cheap lights in here, I missed out on this bit as my girlfriend did it, but there are a lot of lights for a lot of different places. The best way to look at lights is to use the function tab instead of the room tab and look at the lights that way. My favourite ones are the cheap hanging lamps because it’s just a lot easier access. However, we wanted to make the place a bit more snazzy, so we decided to go for wall lamps!
Placing the right items to help your sims is important. If they have the cheapest of everything, then their mood will suffer for it. The most common complaints I get are the bed and shower and fridge. Therefore I tend to make sure I don’t give them really cheap items. I’m currently testing to see if the second cheapest fridge will do anything but it should offer a better mood for them to be in.
My girlfriend and I’s house looked a little like this in the end.
Quick improvements
In the end, we were quite happy with our house, we had about 2k left witch we spent looking around for things but there are always ways of making more than that. My advice to you now is to go onto this guide[http//ttp] and read about the best ways to make money. the guide offers loads of legit ways.
It may not be much to look out now, but you could have the basics of a mansion built! I’ll post some more screen shots in the section below so you can get some inspiration for houses and if you like any, I’ll be glad to help you build them!
Conclusion
Thank you for reading my guide and I hope it’s kind of gone throught he basics and I hope it’s kind of help you realised not everytihng comes straight way – but it will dam feel good when we get there! Later on, I’ll be writing a room by room guide to what they could include, with hopefully some examples of homes made by the people. But that’s all a pipe dream. I hope you’ve all enjoyed it and I am looking forward to hearing any comments and advise you can give about building a house!
II hope it didn’t bore anyone and I hope it did help someone :L If it needs any improvements don’t be afraid to comment and I’ll add them in 🙂 will be updating with the more tricks that I hear about ^-^
Inspiration
Here are a few houses I’ve made and soon, hopefully some that you’ve made and want to share with the community to help you get an idea of what your house could look like. Mix and match! and don’t be afraid to try anything. 🙂
My girlfriend and I’s house – 2k left
My second ever house, almost ran out of money less than 1k left (that would be due to the fencing at the front)
So please message me or leave a comment if you have any houses you want to share and I’ll put my favourite ones up 🙂