Starting again with sim people but keeping the houses

[Trissle]

So I accidentally deleted a bunch of characters, one of my favourite families has gone buggy and generally everything is annoying in Simville so I want to start again
...except...
I've built a bunch of houses which I'm really quite proud of and I don't want to lose them but they have sims living in them

So is it possible to wipe a neighbourhood of all its sims (including townies who might remember the last sims) but keep all the houses?

Is it as simple as deleting all the character files from that neighbourhood and keeping all the other files or am I likely to cause my game to explode if I do that?

[AngelFrouk]

Place the houses in your lot bin. Then delete the whole neighbourhood. Make sure you delete it from your EA folder. This will get rid of everything. The lots will stay in the lot bin.
Then choose your new neighbourhood and start making new sims. If you want to start over with new townies and NPC's too, use the "deleteAllCharacters" cheat. If you use that, make sure you download Pescado's fix first: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,6151.0.html
Otherwise the game won't regerate new ones.

(If you do start a new hood, and you want to download one, download it before you make a new one. I always do it the other way around :P )

[Inge Jones]

If there are sims in the lots in the bin, won't they still be there when the houses are put back into the hood?

[AngelFrouk]

If there are sims in the lots in the bin, won't they still be there when the houses are put back into the hood?
You are so right Inge, totally forgot that. Yes, Trissle should move the people out first.

[Trissle]

I can't move the people out, the game crashes when I try to open that house. Is there another way to chuck them out?

[simsample]

You could go to another lot and teleport them there using the testing cheats, then add them to that family. Their old house will now be vacant but whether it is useable depends on the problem which was causing it to crash in the first place.

[Inge Jones]

Don't open the house, use the Evict icon in your neighbourhood view control panel. Then try to go into your house in Build mode. If it still crashes, you'd better scrap it I am afraid. Next time you make a house you really like, package it and put it somewhere safe before playing a family in it.