Cost: 101.829§
Lot: 3x3
Households: 3

Nightlife and OfB required.
Custom content included: Invisible Driveway, by roddyaleixo


Update, 2007-03-02:
Replaced the zip -- anyone who downloaded this before and got an empty sims2pack, try again. See this thread for more info.


Description:
For sims that are sick of living in the suburbs, Backdoor Lane provides an alternative: a couple of small town lots with a more urban look and feel. They fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, creating a maze of backyard gardens and interconnected alleyways when placed in a tightly spaced neigbourhood. Most of them work as corner lots as well as facing the street, creating a very different impression depending on how you place them and what's on the lot next door.


Backdoor Lane 10
are three row houses with gardens. Two of the houses are identical, in the third one a former tenant has added a basement and changed the doors and such. Access to all houses is either through the garden, via an alley that leads off the street, or through a back/side door into the kitchen.

Each house has:
2 x double bedroom
2 x bathroom
1 x kitchen/dining
1 x upstairs hallway/living room
1 x living room

Plus a basement in house 3. Bathrooms, alarms, phone are provided in all houses; otherwise they're empty except for the ground floor of the first house. Outside lights and gardening included, public phone out front, parking space for four cars off the side alley, cars included.


Notes on multi-household lots:

You can either decide to just use one of these houses for a single household, or have several households together on one lot. I often do that with otherwise neglected single-sim households, former townies and such, that I want to age in sync with the rest of the neighbourhood and be able to become pregnant and so on, without spending the time to play every single one of them separately. That, and the fact that it's otherwise impossible at the moment to build houses directly next to each other (which, to me, is normal in a city), is why I build lots with two or three houses on them.

If you want to use only one house/apartment on the lot: The simplest solution is to lock all other doors with the in-game mechanism that's provided since OfB. Click on the door, select "Lock ... for all sims", done. You don't need any hacks or downloads for this.

If you have only single-sim households on the lot (however many): The simplest solution, again, is to use the in-game mechanism: Click on every front door, select "Lock ... for all but me". Uni users can probably use the Myne Doors for the same effect. I don't know, I don't have Uni ... but you need OfB for this lot anyway. No hacks needed. With OfB door-locking, your sims (to my experience) won't even bitch and whine about stuff behind locked doors anymore.


Other solutions -- *much* more flexible than the in-game stuff:

Four-key locking doors, by Inge @ simlogical (it's online again, yay!), available here (documentation see there). This is sort of the "oldschool" solution -- was already available before Uni even came out. You can lock these doors (one download available for every in-game model up to NL) and hand out keys to your sims. They haven't been updated, but still work in OfB as far as I've tested it. Disadvantage: the hacked doors won't work when placed diagonally (they revert back to a plain in-game door), and you can only hand out four keys for each door -- most of my front doors are 2 tiles wide though, so you could put two one-tile Inge doors in their place and have access control for eight sims.

Complete Security Door System, by Inge @ simlogical, available here. I've no experience with this, but it's well documented + explained (on simlogical, see there).

Authorized Personnel Only Security System, by JMP @ MATY, available here (OfB users) and here
(Pets users -- same version as the OfB one at the moment, but that may change in the future). Excuse the direct links -- I don't want to encourage leeching but didn't see a forum thread about it on MATY, so here goes. Read the RTFM please (included in the zip). This is the most versatile hack I know about, and it's only one download, that's why I personally prefer this one (MATY seems to go down every now and then these days, if you get a timeout try again after a while).

Smart Doors by tunaisafish @ mts2, available here -- read that post for usage instructions, and post all questions there please. Again, I've no personal experience with it, but I heard good things about it and it looks well-maintained, so don't let that stop you.


Possible side effects and how to get rid of them:

Your sims may decide they want to use your neighbour's toilet/piano/tub but can't, because they can't get to it, because the door is locked. And then they'll throw a fit about it, which is annoying and stupid. I haven't actually seen this in a while, not sure if it's gotten better with OfB, but just in case it hasn't: noroutefail (OfB) and noroutefail (Pets), by JMP @ MATY, nukes the annoying animation when the sims can't do something because something else (like a locked door for example) is blocking their route. They'll instead just get a thought bubble with the offending object in it. Will save you a lot of time and nerves; very much recommended.

callover (OfB) and callover (Pets), by JMP @ MATY: Very useful to speed things up on large lots in particular (like apartment houses) -- when you have visitors for example, you'll probably notice that they don't seem to have any idea where you live and hang around on the front porch instead. With this hack, if you call them over the will RUN to where you are instead of tramping across the lot at 2mph. Works for all other sims, as well (not only visitors), regardless of how lazy (=slow) they are otherwise.


Technical issues with any of these hacks, please post where you got them from (in case of MATY hacks, that's http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php ). General in-game questions/ideas/feedback, feel free to ask here =).


Thank you:
This collection (frillen) as well as this one (loba) and that one (windkeeper), the mini lots by Andi8104 and the ones based thereupon (MaryLou) have been very useful in making the Backdoor Lane neighbourhood. Thanks for making them available, as well as for the driveway of course.

Please don't PM me with neighbourhood terrain requests (look in the Neighbourhoods section instead), downloading issues (I can't help you -- look in Site Issues, Q-XPress forums etc), or Build Mode questions (general questions go here, lot specific questions in the d/l thread). Thanks.