I think that's it. It's amazing what you can find when looking at other people's houses. Off to use some loafy paper! LOL

Paper can look different when you are only using half of it either on a half wall or a CFE wall.

Hi

Thanks so much for checking! I hope I removed ever lick of non-Sim CC and a few mods.

It's the Simply Lofty - Dough on the half wall and Simply Wallpaper for Shoppers in Blue on the Kitchen walls.

Wallpapers etc can look very different depending on graphics cards as well. When I upgraded, I discovered some mindblowing textures in game, and some mesh errors I never knew existed both :D

Everyone's entries are looking so nice Whenever I go about making a new town I'm stealing all of your guys' lots so I don't have to build everything my self Just sign them over

Of course, @justJones Look what I made for you today!
Trying to build some more houses without cc in the meantime. Perhaps, after these shooters, I should go and practice some CFE

I had been considering doing that, but really, I would have to see what foundation we'll get. Some foundations could use a little CFE; some are OK as they are.

I'm tweaking the current lot, moving a thing or two and changing one door to an archway. Yup. Another couple of retakes or three or four (Retakes? Pshaw!), but until the remaining 7 entries come in, why not? Nothing huge anymore. I don't think I even have the desire to restructure anything. The routing is OK. Just rearranging a thing or two to make better use of a couple of spaces. If the remaining seven entrants suddenly post in the next fifteen minutes, no big deal.

Gazania, you seem to delete and repost often. Do you know about the edit button? It tends to look a lot neater in the thread if you edit instead of delete. It's over on the right, between the reply and delete buttons.

Yeah, I know I'm a little bad at editing/deleting, and not just in this thread. I'll have to be careful. I think much of my thought process goes as follows:

[Posting] BlahBlahBlah. Sometimes blahblahblah extended version. Edit/edit/edit. Re-reads. Posts.

(Changes mind a few minutes later. Post sounded really stupid/I was so incorrect that I don't want the post to see the light of day/BOY that was verbose, even for me/THAT sounded awful!/etc.. Delete! Delete! Delete!)

(One ... hour ... later [in my best Spongebob Narrator voice]) Or so. Sometimes it's two hours; sometimes it's a half-hour.

Y'know, I want to post. Wait ... I'm the last post, and I can't un-delete and re-edit that. But surely no one will notice ...

Oops. I guess I could delete my stupid/incorrect/verbose/awful text and stick in an appropriate quote as a filler, such as "The Internet is a big distraction" (Ray Bradbury), and the next time, just delete the quote and post what I was going to post, or do that desired amending.

As for pictures ... I think they do help a lot in judging. I suppose like presenting a real-life house, staging is important.

The clearer the pictures, the more the judges will see

Well I edited my entry. There are more changes than I planned, including the roof – I decided to use the pagoda one again, but in a different way. I also improved the garden and managed to add a kitchen counter, and I like the look of that house much more than I did initially

*snatches up the strawberries* Thanks Petro!

I guess I will have to make some more then Looooooong weekend this side, since Thursday, and my son is visiting, but I managed to build sort of a tree house. Waiting for a foundation for the Lamberts Or the hippies.
Bar stays open, 24/7 - anybody has a party in mind? Think judge bribing, er... judge thanking; perhaps?

New entry

Here it is at last. I've played it right through from Monday to Saturday morning, so at least I know it's playable. Web designer Joseph (aka Joe) Elliott and his boy Trevor like the house ok, but Joe wishes it had been a bit cheaper. I gave them the §35,000 as their starting budget and it cost §34,472. Almost immediately when they moved in I realised I hadn't given them a bookcase. They bought the very cheapest one for §200, bringing the effective house price up to §34,672, leaving them with §328 to live on until they earned some money. To Simulate Joe Elliott working on a website for a client, I told him to write a novel on the computer. That of course gave him no income until it was finished, which is fair enough from the client's point of view, but meant a week of being careful for Joe and Trevor. There's a workbench in the shed, and Joe augmented his income by making stuff on it and selling it, but that brought in only §15 in the course of the week. Before he got paid for his website work, Joe had to pay two lots of bills and a repair bill for the computer, which stopped working on Friday morning. When he finally got paid just after midnight on Friday night/Saturday morning, he was down to §69, and was very glad that Trevor has a slow metabolism / small appetite, and doesn't eat much. They didn't have to go cap-in-hand to neighbours and ask to borrow money.

But, enough of the preamble; here is the house!


Front View. Don't ask me why some of the trees on the hill behind have taken to levitating! (Maybe some of the bubbles the hippies blow have drifted their way.)

As you can see they have a bike parked outside. Since I'm just playing along, and am not having to worry about No CC bonuses, I decided to add a couple of CC items: an invisible recolour of the driveway and a bike by mickyss. A bike enthusiast must have a bike!



Well that was a labour of love! I'm sorry it took me so long, but once I'd built it and moved them in, I had to play it, and go on playing it, until Joseph got paid. It was fun playing them, but not so much fun for Joe who had money worries the whole time. Now we can all relax. Joe and his delightful little boy won't starve in their beautiful house!

It’s interesting to see that, like in the first round, everyone had a different idea how to use the foundation, even with no CC each house had a different feel.

@Kukamuukaanmuka it looks like you have UI transparency disabled, have you tried to set it to on? And I like the word myytavana, I’ll probably steal it for a name for something

I allways forget fine-tuning But this time I remembered to get rid of the pauselines (loaded the game to take pics, and daaamn , forgot the mod --> out of the game I go.. Second try, loaded the game.. daaaammiittt... FRAPS isn't on ---> again close the game..)

And lol, I wish my game would be english, not finnish. Now I have to allways remember to put name-mod in when playing custom inhabited hoods, sounds stupid if Sandy Beech goes and buys a new skirt from someone called "Justiina Näkkäläjärvi" :D

Fraps can be turned on while the game is running and it will work.

Sometimes that works for me. Sometimes it causes an error (DirectX). If FRAPS won't start, I just have to quit the game and reload.

I feel like I'm the only one checking the timer to see if it randomly jumped to 1 day! XD

Yes But for some reason if I do other things when my game is on, it starts to lag when I am back at game That is why I like to close it. And after all, only with clothing/hair/genetics-defaults in my dl-folder it loads up pretty fast

I found myself checking the contestants to see who posted their entries. This time, though, I hoped it wasn't all of the contestants at once. I was hoping everyone would take their time for a little while!

I was preparing my lot to package for my good game early this morning when I decided to change the style and colors around to fit a particular hood's house styles before I placed it in my good game. Might was well do it now than later. As I was doing this, I realized I liked the alternate version of the lot far better than the one I submitted.

I think one reason is that despite my insistence the house is a cabin, it really isn't. Calling it a cabin didn't feel right to me, despite my research. There are no logs/planks or extensive stonework that make it realistic, and no joinery or pronounced seams in the case of a log cabin. No fireplace. No wooden ceiling beams. It reminds me of the time a restaurant served my daughter chicken that it called Cajun chicken when it was really Buffalo chicken. No problem with either. But if it's Buffalo chicken, why not CALL it Buffalo chicken? If my house is a contemporary-styled house, why not MAKE it a contemporary-style house? Why try making it a cabin? It's not all snazzy-tricky, but it's a decent contemporary-style house, I think.

And if I like the alternate version better, why not use it? The pictures were a pain, but I know the routing's good! I certainly checked it for days.

So voila, cabin! New paint and some other fixes, and you are now a contemporary house! (One thing that irks me slightly is that the house actually has four different paints/wallpapers, and it may be hard to see that. It's not just one or two! They show up much more clearly in the game. However, since I spent hours trying to match them up, I'm leaving things as is.)

I now realize another reason why I never really quite liked my lot and felt something was off about it and kept futzing with it over and over is that the farmhouse planks made me feel blah. I realize why. They remind me a bit of the paneling so popular in the 70s. Paneling was EVERYWHERE in those days! Brown, brown paneling. All I needed were the avocado counters and appliances in the game, some gold and burnt orange accents, and I'd be good to go. If I wanted to do a retro house, great! But this build was not a retro-style build.

So what I posted is the lot I'll putting in my non-contest game once this is done. Simple and cozy, but my suburban Sims should like it, and my contest Sims enjoy it very much. Re-doing the lot this way saved me quite a few Simoleons, which meant new shinies for them when they moved in. No cheap TV this time! Of course, it meant firing FRAPS up again. I think people are shrugging when they read this from me now ... I am as well. I'm getting really fast with taking and posting new pictures. The first time, it took me a few hours! Now it takes me one or two. The next family, I'll be doing all this in 45 minutes or less, and at the rate I'm going, I'll be taking 15 minutes by the time we get to the community lot!

So now even if all the remaining contestants post their lots by the end of the day, I'm good to go. New pictures taken and duly posted. (I had to fix one with grid-itis, but it didn't take that long. Done.) I don't think I want to try another style with this building. Even my husband commented it really is a contemporary style, and I should muddle with it no more. And with that, I'm going to have more fermented juice, please! Then I'm taking a very, very long nap.

EDIT ... I had to crop the living room picture slightly, but no grid lines and it should do the job. The picture is not distorted. Sleepy time.

I almost feel guilty for not giving my lot a make-over now Great job, Gazania, and there is, of course, plenty of fermented fruit juice!

I hope the timer isn't at one day there are 6 more entries to come in.