Who likes to remodel houses? When I began playing Sims 2 with the Ultimate Collection, I remodeled the Pleasants' house after kicking Daniel out. I liked the end result of my remodel but sadly don't have any pictures.

That's my secret thing-I'll download a house and then completely remodel it to fit my game.
Later it never resembles the house it started out as.

When downloading houses I'll often do small or medium remodels, and I'll nearly always redecorate. I'll usually keep the general outlay, sometimes also the general decoration or furniture outlay (depends on the building and style), but suit it to fit the sims supposed to live there. I've got a favorite downloaded house I've done at least 4 variants of because it's quite versatile.

Never liked building regular houses, but a little bit of fixing is fine, and I like decorating.

I usually modify the structure but I rarely add furniture for houses that contain payables but use their own furniture.

I find it easier to remodel and expand than to start a house from scratch. I always found the Dreamers' house to be very easy to remodel in a number of ways.

I do remodels of remodels.

I probably should but normally the only reason I do anything to a house is if I need to, like if it's not seasons appropriate or the household needs more room. Or it's the Curious household that is just so difficult to play with (imo), that one I remodeled. Love the Curious brothers. Do not love the house EA made them. Cool looking but the playability ...

It is now no longer a secret!

In terms of just changing the wallpaper/flooring or refurnishing the maxis houses, yes. But I typically don't rebuild.
With houses I download I leave them completely as is, because I feel like if I ever were to change anything that I always make it worse than it was. I'm not a builder/decorator and so more often than not that is what happens. It's actually caused me to permanently stop downloading houses on more than one occasion.

I remember when I created my own custom world in sims 3 and sent it all the way across the living room to my mom to playtest on her computer, after she'd been playing for a few days she told me how she loved all of my houses but she felt bad changing anything because of how much effort I put into building everything. So perhaps I've inherited that from her.

Besides, building my own stuff (even if it's a bit meh sometimes) allows me the freedom to make it specifically for my sims, without needing to change anything. That being said, even with my own builds I rarely add/remove walls. If a house is no longer fitting a family I'll build them a new home rather than demolish or remodel the current one.

The homes of my sims, like the homes of people in RL, change all the time
Downloaded some I like, but it normally starts with:
You really do NOT need all these ornaments and flower pots and silly stuff - if we sell them all, we can buy you a fruit tree or a pottery wheel or at least have some space to put down that ant farm.
Need an extra room - let see where I can build one without buggering up the garden. Ot bugger up the garden and make a new one? Oh, it won't work, I will break down the thing when you are at work and rebuild it so that it will work. Needs a bigger porch anyway, and an extra exit door. Oh, this one has a garage, - let's repurpose that. Bring on the sledgehammer.
Got a bonus? Let's buy expensive carpets and a new painting to up that room score then How about new bedding too - even if it won't change the room score.
Later: now may be a good time to buy some ornaments and flower pots and silly stuff.

Nope. I typically consider others builds, even Maxis ones, 'historical' so I tend to make minor alterations at most. after building over 200 lots, I think I'm a builder for sure.

I will do both building and remodelling as needed since my home builds in my BACC are likely to be horrible as they look like I'm awful at building because I'm limiting my building to the skill level of my pioneer settlers in Dodge.The awful blocks and boxes in Dodge are so like how the settlers in the old west really built that it's fun to have it look like the real old west.I'll also place blank lots and buils my own homes from starters to small family homes.I only put basics in a home as my sims usually take their things with them when moving house.

I love remodeling houses! I'm even toying around the idea of hosting a Downtown remodeling contest. But I'm not sure of the scale. I think I need to take my idea and break it down a bit.

But anyway, I really like reworking premade houses and buildings--that's my first go to and what I usually do. It's really only in the last few years that I really started building my own stuff from scratch, and even that only happened as I started to get more into apartments. For the first time it was easier for me to design something I liked from scratch then to make some of Maxis' lots work--you know the deal: odd shaped rooms, bad routing, not enough bathrooms, units too high up, not enough stairs. Etc. That's when I really starting building, or at least when I started to think of myself as more of a builder. I remember really dreading build mode in my early sim days.

It's still hard for me to come up with a look by myself, though, especially for community lots. I never seem to be as imaginative as some; I have to look up a house plan or build off of a picture. So I still remodel a lot even now.

When I was playing last year (my computer has been out of commission for a while now), I had started remodeling Pleasantview for another eventual attempt at a megahood. The houses were especially fun because I was modifying them to meet certain specifications, to match the playstyle I wanted to achieve. So all houses had to have space for laundry machines and a furnace, for example. And I had 3 tiers of houses depending on lot size and price. So I took some those lot bin houses and the Dreamer house and made them all 2x2, I think, and 3 bedrooms (with closets!), 2 baths. Those were all mid tier. Whereas the Broke house and those matching trailers became my low tier. Still 3 bedrooms, usually, but with 1 bath and no closets on a 2x1 or 1x2. Again it was fun to figure out what layouts I could accept that I could still see being in a low tier--I like squared, spacious bedrooms and all my sims need cars, so yeah, a bit of a challenge.

Idk what it is but remodeling always feels less intimidating and seems like less work, even when that's absolutely not true and the end result is nothing like the original.

Like Phantomknight, I haven't been able to play for a while because of a crashed computer, so this is how I used to play up til late last summer: Maxis houses that premades live in are largely off bounds. They keep their sometimes annoying floor plans and their style of wallaper/flooring and furniture. I will only make changes if I really have to, for example if no room in the house can fit a double bed. Houses I've downloaded are usually very carefully chosen and I'm usually happy with general layout but if I'm not I don't feel bad at all about changing it. I put down Maxis bin lots and downloaded builds in a searate buildhood, then I "tidy" them by removing the "flower pots and silly stuff" like Justpetro said, and change out the Maxis wood I can't stand to wood I can stand, rebuild anything that needs rebuilding (like season proofing roofs or adding extra bathrooms). This way I have a "tidied" master copy of the houses that I can copy over to the live hoods and I don't have to remodel the lot every single time I want to use it - the less time I have to spend on housing in the game, the better!

The great advantage of remodeling is that you don't face that first moment of "What the heck do I do with the foundation? How big should it be? Where should I place it? Oh, no, did I leave room for a driveway?"

I have become accustomed to remodeling because my ideas of what makes a playable house don't seem to mesh with those of most people, and absolutely not with whatever the heck the original Maxis builders were doing. Most Maxis houses I find completely unplayable, and most downloadable houses are too expensive for the families I want to have them to afford, and often have one feature or another that drives me wiggy. I can't stand wasting space on pillars and supports made by enclosing empty space with walls, for example, and absolutely no basements for me! I can't play them because they trigger balance issues.

I have a standard procedure for remodeling an unplayable house. The first thing to do is to gut it - just take out all the interior walls so I can look at the footprint of the house as a whole and get a sense of its best arrangement.

This leads directly to the second thing, which is to consider the purpose of the remodel. Do I know who will live there? Is there a neighborhood aesthetic that needs to be upheld? Does it matter how much it will ultimately cost? Do any of these things justify the alteration of the footprint?

Aesthetic is usually the thing that concerns me least, but sometimes it's the whole point of the remodel. I have a retro set-up in which different neighborhoods belong to different eras, and not only do the 1920s Brokes and the 1920s Goths have wildly different income brackets from each other, but they have wildly different available choices than the modern Brokes and Goths. I had to change the footprint of the Broke home because their era-appropriate home would be a shotgun shack, and there was no room at the ends for the front and back doors and the gallery porch required by the style. A shotgun shack, by definition, is one you can shoot through the front door and the ammo will exit the back without hitting anything. It is one room wide and the doors between the rooms have all the doors in a line. You may ask yourself, "What about the bathroom?" and the answer is: "What bathroom?" At the social/economic level of the Brokes, indoor plumbing, gas, and electricity would have been luxuries, so I had to set up other arrangements. The Goths could have all three, and I could keep their footprint, but installing them in a house built without them created certain practical problems, which would affect the floorplan. The plumbing and cooking arrangements of an apartment lot might vary a great deal depending on decade, income level, and age - even as late as the 1960s, in some rental arrangements in older buildings, tenants might be sharing bathing facilities with other tenants or be forbidden to cook in their rooms. Fantasy, science fiction, and themed remodels would would have similar aesthetic/practical considerations.

Playability is my most important concern. I don't want any sims trapped in corners, absurd routing, or hallway traffic jams, and I like to have the option of having the toddlers and all their toys on the same floor as the kitchen. So it's very important to have an idea of how many sims will be living there. The Ottomai need four bedrooms (nursery/Dora, parents' room, boy's room, girl's room) and enough kitchen/dining space for a big table, bouncy chairs, and high chairs, as well as nice clear sight lines so spoiled bottles and stray homework can't lurk unseen. The nursery should probably be the biggest room and can be turned into a playroom once Samantha stops having babies, if she ever does. Bedrooms should be a minimum of 4x4 and a maximum of 5x6, should all be accessible from the stair hall (upstairs) or the main living area (on the ground floor), and can be irregular in shape but should not have slanted walls without a very good reason because I can't be bothered with off-grid placement and most furniture should be adjacent to a wall, leaving lots of free space in the middle for routing, dancing, and playing. Open sightlines are essential so I can see what people are doing and don't make myself dizzy or nauseated. Bathrooms are 2x3 or 3x3, unless the layout of the house makes a one- or two-square alcove to accommodate a fixture practical. I hate 4x2 bathrooms passionately. I want front and back doors, windows in every room, and if possible a wet wall so that the plumbing makes sense.

Once I have the floorplan laid out I can look at the price and determine things like wall and floor treatments, and whether to furnish now or just install the fixtures that would come with a newly-bought house. If nobody's living there and I don't know who I'm moving in I generally just install the fixtures. A lot of my sims routinely pack up their furniture in inventory when they move house. If I'm moving an unplayed family straight from the family bin, though, I go ahead and furnish it, so I don't train them to roll wants to buy stuff. I'm certain this practice is one reason my Fortune sims don't constantly clamor for new stuff, as a lot of people complain theirs do. I have very strong opinions about which fixtures to use. In a modern setting there is no good reason not to have a shower tub - every house I've ever lived in has had one. In most settings there is no point whatsoever in having a stove with a Hunger rating of less than 4 - they might as well not have a stove as use the cheap electrical one with its rating of 1. (That said, the retro Brokes have a coal stove with a value of one - it doubles as a wastebasket and catches fire easily, but it's 100% period-appropriate and Brandi has enough cooking points to offset the low food rating.) Rooms each get one ceiling light, except for bathrooms, which get a wall light, and there may be wall lights next to exterior doors.

Use the little information button in the upper left corner to keep track of cost. You can always add more furniture once the sims have lived there for awhile and accumulated cash.

I will have different housing designs in Dodge as it grows and they will become more varied as I starte to allow myself to build more advanced houses to reflect on my sims becoming better at building.I'm restricted to faking being bad a building to match my building skills in Dodge to those of the settlers arriving here as homesteaders.I'll start with more basic boxes for pre-built homes in the town's early days to simulate nobody being good at building.The designs get more advanced and vaired when the town is growing and eventually get divided up into restrictions of the types of homes built in each neighborhood within the town.Dowtnown is likely to have mostly smaller homes and many of the apartments for the lower income sims while another might have smaller though more expensive houses and even expensive apartments for proessional working couples.

I'm not good at building... My houses turn out to be very big or very small and all look like boxes! But I love to remodel EA's houses that I don't like the way they are but I think they have... possibilities! For example, in the sims 3, the "Ye Olde Tudor" (Sunset Valley) "sits" now on a 64X64 lot, it has 3 floors (which can be expanded more if needed), it has a huge backyard with a large pool, playground for the kids, (european) football field, basketball court and many more sports stuff from the sims 3 store and a full garden with all the available sims 3 plants. It has a large garage for 4 cars and under the garage there is a huge basement with a home gym (including martial arts), game room with arcade machins, full stone-walled nectary and a kitchen room with all the sims 3 store premium cooking objects (pizza oven, bakery oven, canning station etc.). It is saved in my Library for all my "filthy" rich sims who want to enjoy their lives.

I like to do the same thing for the sims 2 houses but I find the... procedure to save and re-use them very tedious so I just re-do them everytime I need them. Just yesterday I "rebuilt" the Grand Estate (from the bin) because I wanted to place it on a larger lot (I hate this fact about the sims 2, that I can't take a house from the bin and just place it on a larger lot), so I openned the already remodeled house in one of my hoods and I started to calculate the dimensions of each room. It took me half a RL day but I did it (yay!). Two houses from the bin that I can now remodel almost with my eyes closed (lol!) are the Cape Cod Classic and the Federal Fortess (this usually becomes a college "private" dorm but the Ottomas family have lived there in the past too!)

@natbsim75 just use Lot Adjuster and make the lot larger, it's really easy. I would also clean them-also easy. Doing that, unless the lot is super simple is far quicker then trying to rebuild them.

I often send new Sim families to a "Horror" house, weeds, burned stuff, roaches. Then (depending on whither the Sims inspire me) I give them a themed house (MCM, alien/modern, ornate, grunge). And if they keep wanting to garden or swim, I have to enlarge the lot. I like waiting till everyone is asleep, turning "move objects on" and moving the sleeping sims to the yard...along with every item I can reuse. Silly, I always feel like "hee hee, they'll be so shocked when the wake up". Of course, they aren't, and don't appreciate my improving their navigation.. Hay, the twins now have a room near the kitchen, instead of the barn.

This is inspiring me to look up house plans and save them so I can recreate them as best as I can in game for my sims. I don't know why i'm too lazy to do that, I know I can, and it'd make me happy to do it for my sims.

I know that a lot of my homesteaders will just modify their own homes as needed and as they move up in wealth since their homes will get passed on to the next generation in most cases.Others living in starter homes will likely be moving up which means packing up he home to move out when they've outgrown it and can finally afford to move up.Others living in apartments will buy when they've saved up though most likely a large homestead lot and will start out farming and eventually upgrade to a mansion.

I agree. Most of the time I prefer to create a house from scratch especially if it is part of a challenge such as a BACC but occasionally I will renovate a premade house because I feel like it.

My houses also do turn out boxy when I first build them. What works for me is starting out with boxy then making the houses less boxy over time.

Nothing wrong with boxy. I, personally, am boxy. Well, more "pear" than "box" actually.

My pear is boxy too.
I like to build from scratch, it's one of my favourite things to do! I like building entire neighbourhoods from scratch. But my builds are rather simple, and easy to play with.