Hi guys,

I really hope some of you can spare some time to help me out, and answer me this:

Me and Hubby are planning to redecorate our house in this brand new year and, seeing that I am the Alpha Female, I get to make most of the decisions.

However, maybe because I seriously lack describing skills, or because we have no I-totally-understand-what-you-mean-by-sandpaperish-walls connection, I thought I would design our house within The Sims 2, so I could show him my obviously brilliant plan.

Now I have a floor-plan of our house, with exact measurements of walls, windows and all that stuff, and seeing that I am not very good at guessing measurements, I was wondering if there is any way to build stuff with exact numbers.

Does, for example, anyone know how many meters (sorry, Europe here, I count in meters) one square is, in game?
Do the standard doors have a certain size?

Is there any way I could do this, or am I forced to just wing it?
I'm afraid it will all be very Extreme Home Makeover, and then be a total disaster when everything gets put into action, since I have the tendency to guess larger rather than smaller, which is probably why my Sims always start in a 2 bedroom house and end up in a 7 level The Burrow-like structure, with a bowling alley, party room and spa.

Any help would be highly appreciated!

Greets from Holland!

BTW: I have all expansion packs, if that is of any importance.

Building things with "Exact Numbers" is relatively meaningless in the Sims, because the game has fixed-precision in terms of walls (wall segments are approximately 1m, and doors and windows must always be on a single segment), and because Sims themselves are unlike real people in their space requirements. While a 1m wide corridor is adequate for anyone who isn't a whale in real life, such a construction is just not acceptable for a sim, and the area will become impassable. Similarly, Sims require more clearance around furniture than actual humans. On the flipside, sims simply have no need for some thing that humans do, and a corresponding space in a real house mapped to a sim house would thus be wasted space, likely too small to be used for anything useful.

i tried this idea a while ago and as J. M. Pescado says it isnt the same as real life it can only give a sort of 50% accuracy and a very rough idea, of where furniture would go.
Might be good for colour schemes though.

but i used a programme from ikea to design our bedroom. Perhaps you could try that for the furniture.

there are 2 products I know of- now a 3rd from the above post, but both cost money
http://www.punchsoftware.com/index.htm
and
http://www.plan3d.com/pages/interio...nhome.aspx?rd=1

I don't know how desperate you are to actually pay to accomplish it but they're there non the less.

Wow, thank you guys for thinking along on January 1st haha!

@J.M. Pescado, I do not plan to actually have Sims living there or anything. It is, like I wrote before, merely to show my Hubby what my ideas are. I know walls are fixed measurements, but windows and such can obviously be cheated into the position I eventually want them to be.

@ejnarts1, Thank you very much! I will have a look into those as well. I already found some online ones, but although they were quite easy, there were almost no design options, let alone furniture. I love The Sims, but I will certainly look into those two options.

@Mike, what program did you use? Would you mind linking me if that's possible?

1 square roughly equates to 1 meter or 3 feet. Balance this vs. the need for symmetry in certain areas, and window/door placement, as well as playability (i.e. don't make hallways too tiny, etc.) and you should get something roughly approximating your house. No need for special programs - if you really want, get some graph paper and sketch it out first. I've built several houses from real plans and that measurement plus some common sense has always worked just fine for me.

Actually, no, this won't work -- unless you're happy with windows and doors that have no wallmask (hole). Doors, windows, stairs, fences, walls/halfwalls, roofs (and probably more things that escape my mind right now) can only be put inside the fixed grid.

Depending on what kind of windows your real house has, you may be able to find sim windows that exist both in one- and two-tile versions -- those would give you a little more flexibility. Check out the work by leesester, MaryLou and phoenix_phaerie on this site; for a one-tile version of the Seasons window (shuttered window) look at http://sims2code.hk . There's probably others on other sites .. if you know what exactly you're looking for, you can ask for pointers in the "Where can I Find" forum at sims2community.

@squeeezable: I guess Mike was referring to this software's: http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/rooms_...shplanners.html