I'd like to find a site that has free house plans. Does anyone know of any?

Most house plans you have to pay for - but you don't need to actually get a full real set of house plans suitable for building a real life house - just the preview pics to go by - usually a front view, sometimes a back view, plus the floor plans. Type "house plans" into Google and you'll get TONS of sites to choose from. If you want to get more specific, try "victorian house plans" or "ranch house plans" or "modern house plans" and you'll still get tons of good results.

You could always buy those homeplan magazines in the grocery stores or like at walmart. They have tons of plans in them and cost around $10.

You can also look at realty sites (Homes for sale).

I just did a basic search and found this site:
http://www.familyhomeplans.com/sear...ordercode=06WEB

It's better to search for homes for sale than to search for house plans.

I find it works out well if i just design them myself, people often comment on how good my floorplans are but with a little thought you can go a long way

Dream Home Source: www.dreamhomesource.com

This site has everything you're looking for. You'll want to modify the plans in order to make it fit the Sims 2 universe, but the plans give you plenty of ideas. Best of all, it's free! (So long as you don't actually try to buy the house plans)

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=217329
may check out the links or google for more.

you can also go to http://www.houseplans.com

Also hgtvpro.homeplans.com has every style of home you can imagine.

I do that all the time. you get a ton for the price.

http://www.architecturaldesigns.com/

Wonderful site. Using the search engine and the right side you can specify exactly what you are looking for in house. Easily downloadable blueprints are also very useful.

nice find erica. I think i'll be using this a lot. :D

If you are intersted in historical buildings, take a look at some of the various paper-models available. Some of these you can find on the Internet for free- like these:

http://www.haunteddimensions.raykeim.com/index301.html

They don't provide interior floor-plans, but with a little adjustment they should be quite useful (...and if you are any good with scissors,glue and a craft-knife,they'll provide an interesting 3D-model into the bargain!)

Edit: This just occurred to me- it's should also be possible to do the reverse-thing, and turn any Sims-2-creation into a 3D-paper-model...Including a Sim !

http://www.3dpaper.com/

www.amazingplans.com

there is thousands there, i have just used a plan from there and uploaded it here(waiting to be approved) and the plans are quite easy to follow if you know the ins and outs of the building tools on TS2.

i normally go to eplans.com . they have a ton of house plans that are easy to print out. i take the dimensions and divide them by half, and normally come up with the same plan.

this is a list of my favorite designers. you can Google them and come up with their house plans:

• Frank Betz
• Garrell Associates
• Donald Gardner
• Visbeen Associates
• Weir Brothers
• DreamHomeMagazine.com

I create many of my own house plans and i hope to update those soon. hope these were helpful :D

Heh, the house i just uploaded was based on a donald gardner model. And garrell associates is a good one too for stylish homes.

I use a ton of his stuff. i first found his house plans in a southern living house plan book. theres a whole book of his stuff in the bookstores. or at least, there was... it was in the magazine section. anyways, I\'ve based a lot of my house plans on some of his work. i really like Frank Betz too.

I work for a house plan company - we're interested in possibly making one or more of our house plans available to the sims community.

I'm posting here to find out what we can do to make our house plans useful to you... such as pre-converting them to sims-size, putting them on a grid, etcetera.

Please pm me or send an email to [email protected] and let me know.

In the mean time I will be researching past posts here, but I would really like something of an authoritative response so I can tell my bosses what you guys are looking for!

also... I'm a total sims nube. I haven't played since the original simcity on commodore 64. Are there other sims games that allow you to input your own house designs? Do you think we can make one plan that works for all of them?

note to moderators - I'm going to post this in its own thread too, let me know if that's too much!

~Chris

ps: erm... at the risk of being spammy I thought I'd share our house plans and floor plans from theHouseDesigners.com

lol Just have some cool floor plans and elevations. Sims don't use closets, but closet space can be converted to alcoves to hold dressers. You can't import the file and have the game make your house for you. You just look at the plan and start building walls and add furnishings and fixtures, etc.

There are some problems with diagonals and roof and fixture placement but they can be gotten around for the most part. AND, there are enough modders here that if the game doesn't have a part, someone can make it for the game, if it interests them to do so.

Hey porkypine! Thanks for writing back!

So if we were to make our plans more Sims2 accessible we could:
1) take out diagonals
2) take out the closets

and it's important for US to remember that there's no way to import files directly. you have a wysiwig house building system.

After checking out the house plans on our site (link directly to the search section... the home page also has a good list of styles to click on and choose from) do you have any thoughts on any you'd like see open? Getting an idea of which are most popular will help us make the decision.

Also... it sounds like you wouldn't need any of the measurements on the plans, just the grid in the background.

Let me know your thoughts! I appreciate your help and hope to hear from others regarding what would be your house plan "dream come true."

~Chris
the house plan man

To be honest, it's easy enough for simmers to convert house plans themselves, and a lot of it is a matter of taste and playability as well as symmetry. A couple of house plans from one site converted really isn't going to be all that helpful, IMO, as most house builders who would work from plans can do that easily enough themselves, and they've got the whole internet's worth of plans to choose from, in a bajillion different styles, and it only takes a little while to convert a plan to the game once they've chosen one that inspires them. A pad of graph paper or a graph function in any graphics editing program would accomplish this, and gives the individual house builder the option of changing it around how they like - deciding how to convert tricky features, and also what features are most important to keep and what can be changed around for the game's sake. Diagonals can be gotten around in some cases or converted to other things, sideways garages either built with a lot of fiddling or removed entirely, etc., so having "premade build it like this" plans I don't think is gonna be all that helpful for people, considering so much of it is the builder's choice, and plans are just a general guide anyway.

Without that level of individual builder creativity and choices, it's really a "build it once according to the guide and the move on" kind of thing - not really that useful except to one person, who builds it, uploads it, and nobody else has a reason to use the same plan again.

I also have to admit I'm more than a bit skeptical about this whole thing in general. I can't really see the point of a house plan site (who sells their plans for numbers in the hundreds or thousands) converting them for use in a game, when the majority of sims players are generally young, and the potential for sales due to publicity for this is quite low. That, combined with a gmail address rather than an @thehousedesigners.com address makes me go, "Hmm, sounds like they very well might be full of it." I'd be happy to be proven wrong (wouldn't be the first time) via some message posted on the actual website about this... But you'd be surprised the amount of weird crap people make up in this community - we've had people make up stories about dead husbands, people dying of cancer, multiple personalities, and one guy that accused me of somehow causing the death of his father because I'd banned him - so we really never know. :P

Hey HystericalParoxysm, thanks for writing back!

It sounds like the graph proportions will vary depending on the designs...

We'd thought perhaps of adding a graph over top of the design, which might actually make things MORE difficult. Do you agree?

Also, we're talking about a printable PDF at 81/2x11 size... do you think that would be helpful? Sounds like for the "by hand graph paper" folks it might.

I understand your skepticism... we're thinking longer term with Sims2 users. Folks who are into modding and designing their own homes in Sims2 will likely become folks who will want to build their own homes in the future. Also, if we can make something truly useful to simmers then we could potentially build publicity, traffic and links from the various Sims2 blogs out there...

It's kind of a longshot, but we thought there might be something simple we could do on our site that could have some potential benefit to us and to simmers.

Um... my boss wondered about scale. Is that irrelevant due to the fact that most modders and home builders will add their own grid/graph anyways? He thought maybe 1/12th scale?

I didn't mention but most of the houses have available layouts:
http://www.thehousedesigners.com/pl...sp?PlanNum=5316

Is this really all that a house builder needs to get rolling?

Thanks again for your response!

~Chris

I can understand where you are coming from with the 'long run' ideas. I am at a design school or Architecture and Interior design and create many of my own house plans in game to get a feeling of flow and manageability. Since Sims are like humans in the environment ratio and how much space they truly need, it is an item that i use a lot not only for work, but also for entertainment.

I have posted earlier in this thread a list of designers that i find easy enough to follow in the game. What i do to make the plans easy enough to build is divide the dimensions by half and that is my Sim scale. this usually requires a larger lot, but i get a true-to-life house.

HystericalParoxysm is right in that each individuals taste determines what house plan they will convert to Sim. Honestly, unless you will create a house plan image for all your house plans that is directly related to Sim scale, i think you might be wasting your time.

Creating house plans just for the Sims is something you might want to talk to Maxis about as well. They might have more input on the situation. While its a good idea to see what the consumers are doing, HystericalParoxysm is right again in saying that most of the users are young and will most likely stay that way. I have met few middle aged or older (people who would want to build their own homes) simmers. As they get older, they have less time for Simming.

Just a few tips from a Consumer and fellow Architects POV