To unlock another career in my Build-A-City-Challenge neighbourhood, I built this new dance studio. Will it be profitable? No chance, but the family that will own it is already extremely rich, so I don't care. Form over function, if you will.

Garden of Eden, a restaurant occupying the 3rd and 4th floors of Eden Cinetheather, opens its doors and I'm now 2 floors closer to finally finishing this behemoth of a building. Given my recent discovery that hotels work in main hoods, I might make the two top floors as luxury rooms but we'll see.

Country Bakery

The Cymbeline - a 5 bedroom family home by Jones & Moltke

Jones & Moltke Construction (Veronaville) Ltd. have decided to bring some rationality to the design of houses they are building in the suburbs of Veronaville and elsewhere. In the past their houses have all been architect designed, and individually built for each customer. This is really proving too time-consuming and expensive. While "cookie cutter" estate houses can sometimes get a bad reputation, for being unsympathetic with the landscape, there is undoubtedly a demand for attractive high-quality affordable housing, that can be built quickly, so that buyers do not have to wait years before they can move into their new homes. The company is therefore introducing a standardised range of attractive houses, that can be completed to requirements and wishes of the buyers. Creative Director Julian Moltke-Jones says, "Coming as we do from the beautiful historic town of Veronaville, we shall always strive to ensure that our houses enhance the landscape rather than detracting from it. We build homes that are designed for our buyers to love, and to live in for many happy years."

Having as a pilot built a number of single storey houses to a standard floorplan in Elswyn, the company is extending their range to larger family homes. The Cymbeline is the first of these. In view of the Veronavillian roots of the company, the standardised house designs will all be given Shakespearean names. The Cymbeline is still very much a work in progress, with the arrangement of windows, doors and internal walls still being decided. Hence the lack of windows in the side of the house! But Managing Director Andrew Jones-Moltke says, "We're confident we'll have The Cymbeline on the market before long. Like all our houses it will be fully equipped with lighting, plumbing, and cooking facilities. It will include a telephone connection and a fire alarm directly connected to the local fire station. While we hope to keep the price affordable, we will not compromise on quality or safety. I hope we can keep the price to §30.000 - §35.000, though obviously it can go higher if the buyer specifies expensive kitchen and bathroom fittings. However I for one see no point at all in building unaffordable housing. Despite the traditional appearance of these houses, I must stress that these are modern houses built to the highest standard by our skilled craftsmen and -women. Our priorities as always are value for money and customer satisfaction."

Love to see the inside

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Are those curved "glass bricks"? Can you send link?

There are some inside pictures on my tumblr here

I assume you're talking about that bit to the right. Those are curved windows, converted from TS3 Roaring Heights, though I'm pretty sure there's no actual "glass" texture in there so yeah, I guess they could work as bricks. Here's the link.

Pond picture, just because...


(The pond shaders kind of act as if the reflections lag behind a bit, not sure if they tend to do that with pond water? Never used those before. It's one of Dreadpirate's light hacks with Voeille's shaders. It's nice, but kind of feels a bit messy, too. I almost prefer the old EAxis water...But maybe I just have to get used to it. Was a bit confused when I saw a dark blob of water at first and wondered if my game was at it with some shady business again - almost forgot I had the shaders , but then remembered the pool trick).

Not an exact Match, but as close as I could make it.

Is it a prison? It looks rather like Strangeways Prison in Manchester.

None of my Sims has ever done anything bad enough to go to prison, so here are a couple of pictures of schools in my game.


New Desconia School on the tropical isle of New Desconia


Baldrair Heights School in Baldrair Bluffs

The mentors in our schools try to make them a really fun experience for their pupils. I'm sure they'd feel they were failing in their vocations if they thought that any of their charges felt that school was like a prison. It has to be said though that one girl did once run away from Baldrair Heights School. Neither I nor Miss Leitch (her teacher) can understand why.

SC4's Federal Prison, I was surprised as it seems no one appears to have recreated it.

Usually build Victorian and mid-century-modern, but been having fun building extreme (just to see how my peoples can handle odd stuff). Here's a clean modern house:

The Bells have moved out!

(I found out the hard way most of my CTD seems to be tied to the lot it happened in, for some reason. Moving my sims to a new house always fixes it, here's hoping it'll work for the Bells too!)

This is one of the premade houses in Desiderata Valley, the one with the god-awful roof. Turned it into a boxy modern house. It's rather small, but it's got everything the Bells might need (an empty room for their baby daughter when she's old enough to get her own room, three bathrooms [one's an en-suite], upstairs balcony, and a large backyard with plenty of room for expansion). They better not have any more children though--at least for the time being.

Working on my "Roma" neighborhood - recreating the ancient city (as envisioned by the HBO series). In researching building styles, I spied an artist's rendering of what they called "The Temple of the Vestal Virgins". Knowing that the temple in Rome - donated to the Vestals by Caesar - was actually a round building (impossible in the Sims), I was nonetheless captivated by the image of a Classical building built into/onto a hillside, with terraced gardens alongside, and so I created this. My community lots must be functional for the needs of the Sims, so I always include diverse sorts of amusements and amenities, thus the photobooth (in a PBK "historic" disguise), party keg (with serendipitously purple beer), etc. That lovely-looking tree grove on the lower terrace is actually an outdoor toilet that I found somewhere... cute, right? There was nothing inside (can't think of a useful "temple" function in the Sims, really), so I came up with the idea that the Vestals opened their grounds on festival days to paying guests, to supplement their income. ALSO, and unfortunately, one of my countless pieces of CC corrupted the lot, and the whole thing vanished before I had time to finish it... hence the lone, exterior screenshot. I've since become more rigorous about backing up the neighborhood after each successful build, but as I hadn't done so in the interim between the last backup and the vanishing, this is gone forever, and will have to be rebuilt at some point.

Next up (and taking its place, function-wise) is an entirely different sort of public lot: an "arena" building, where bloodsports (AKA boar- and bear-hunting, courtesy of Sun & Moon) could be watched, along with the usual sports-event accompaniments of food and drink. Not being able to recreate the Coliseum per se (see above complaint about lack of rotundity in Sims buildings), it's a sort of Ancient Roman version of a mashup of the old Chicago Stadium and Wrigley Field... photos to follow, once it's done.

So.. it turns out it's really important to keep graves around on the Sims 2, so I took my first crack at building my own graveyard, naturally built from scratch, just a plot of land.

To avoid moving graves issues, I decided my richest sim family would buy an empty community lot and build a grave yard for the dead. Then they can take the graves / urns there and place them without needing to "cheat" the game to allow build/buy on the lot. Makes sense in my head.

Almost 300k in sim money later, we have this that family is now down to their last 120k poor souls. Then I thought, well I'll give the business side of things a try, since I haven't used that element of the game yet and added a little selling area to it, to try to earn some of that money back

This is my first attempt at building a grave yard in any sim game. It's not quite finished, but the foundation is there. I just do this for fun, so it's not built to high standards for sharing etc. Oh the second story and above is "closed off" because I wanted this to be like an old building, so pretend it's sealed off for "safety" reasons. Anyway, here goes:

This is my first Japanese home as a vacation home in Takemizu Village. It's a renovation of Pearl Mist Estate and my sim family is staying in it at the moment. It's totally out of my comfort zone because I'm into more western retro/vintage style and I tried looking at Pinterest pictures and working with what I have. I still have some rooms that are off to me and feel free to give me some recommendations.

Shots that I love:




I abosuletly love this view but I feel like the platform is too empty but I have no idea what to add in a Japanese style





Rooms I'm not that satisfied with:


I love this bathroom but I have no idea what do do with floors and walls - hardwood or tiles. I want it to be traditional combined with modern.



It's okay, I guess, I feel like the roof is badly made in the game


The master bedroom, everything is so off and I tried making it mid century modern, traditional and minimalist. The wall behind the bed is accented and the rest is white.

My latest sim generation decided they wanted a beach lot after going on vacation, they visited the rental apartments in front of the beach, it had a great view! But not quite nice enough, so they purchased a plot of land in front of those apartments and began to build their life!

This is the results, so far! I'm starting to get the hang of TS2's build system now, it's not quite finished, much like most of my builds (they tend to be never ending projects), and again it's just for my self :-)



(Custom build, empty plot)

The Curious house, after remodeling following a stuck-Sim situation and a blooper - I tried to retain the quirky feel while improving the functionality. The second floor is for the kids' bedrooms (there are three kids - Vidcund had fraternal twins and they are now all teenagers), and the third provides access to the Farstar telescope plus an auxiliary bathroom (they need it).

I've remade this house so many times --it's just impossible. And by the time I removed all that random yard flooring, and all the stairs stuff on the roof there was plenty of $. There was no room for toddlers, traffic issue, one big rediculous bathroom, and has anyone every figured out how much time it would take for a Sim to star-gaze on that top scope?!

So I moved a college guy and his brother to this dump. They wanted $$$ and parties, so I gave them...lots! created this house with some ideas I got from a TV show about multi-million houses in Malabu. Indoor pool in the atrium, with "pool house" - rest room, sauna, etc. The kitchen is open to a big dinning room, and the game room. A bridge connecting the separated upper levels, where a master bath is bigger than some homes! There is also a small study and a theater. Had too expand the lot..a lot. I always expect Sims to go "WTF what happened!"

The house was designed to be weird, not functional. Currently it has 5 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms (two on the first floor, one on the second floor, and the auxiliary bathroom n the third floor), and the traffic patterns still get weird. (No one has looked through the 'scope since Vidcund had his twins - I wonder if it's still tweaked to call the aliens?)

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In my game, function is first! I can still do weird. Really, these are supposed to be brilliant scientist, and they couldn't figure out a bathroom? I gave them stalls and group showers..who has time for modesty?

My daughter and I share a neighbourhood that we pass back and forth to each other. It's pretty much vanilla. These are two lots I built in it recently.

Railroad Diner:


No-tell Motel:

As I've posted recently about the Newsons in Veronaville, here are some pictures of the house at 2 Via Veronaville where they've been living for the last few years.


Front View -- The house viewed from the street side.
The hut beside the house is where former Veronaville Romance townie Regina Tsvirkunov is now living. She moved in a couple of days ago, and is trying to help the Newsons out. Her own resources are quite limited, but she's doing her best to improve the Newsons' living conditions. Regina's heart has always been in the right place. She is the first adult in years to win Ginger and Gavin's trust. She has been helping them clear out some of the weeds from the garden. Until recently it was even more overgrown.


Side View -- The house viewed through the arch of the aqueduct.
I think I am right in describing it as a picturesque hovel.

Now a couple of views showing the interior:

Ground Floor
That's Georgia playing on the left. Note the unmatched dining chairs.


Upper Floor
Gavin is just getting out of bed. The rest are still sleeping. The pictures were taken at 6:05 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. Since moving in, Regina has bought new beds for the older Newsons. Until two days ago they were all sleeping in the cheapest Craftmeister beds. Ginger did her best to give the toddlers a nice nursery.

I suppose you might say the house has a sort of rustic charm. But I have no doubt about it -- poverty stinks! I wonder how much of this sort of thing goes unnoticed in the charming countryside.