When I say "builders" I mean those of you that actually design and build your houses, not being an interior designer. What inspires you to created these great houses?

I am not a good architect at all. I usually build my houses in squares or rectangles, lol. How can I unleash my inner builder?

Hi!

I suggest you watch some Youtube videos (look up Sims 3 houses or something similar). I learned a few things watching some. Don't make your rooms all square or rectangle. Try to make a few smaller rooms. Use the blueprint option to help you.

Blueprints of actual houses. Seriously, I sucked at making houses in sims until I did that. I usually end up on eplans.com, but there are plenty of other good sites.

And yeah, definitely look up some tutorials. That's how I learned L-shaped stairs, which has been particularly helpful.

I am not a builder, but I have made some houses I've been happy with. The only way I can make a decent house is to make a house that I've already lived in IRL or I use blueprints. There's plenty of blueprints on websites out there, but you can also get books from the library or buy magazines with houseplans in them.

I've found that converting 2.5 feet to be 1 Sim Square works out pretty good.

I live in an area with a lot of interesting architecture, so I go for long walks and look at houses. It kind of helps that my dad's a carpenter and I've grown up on HGTV and This Old House, but I can usually get a vague sense of a home's layout by looking at the exterior and the placement of windows and doors. Just looking at houses and trying to replicate what you see can really shake up your buildings.

I live in Brisbane, which contains a weird mixmatch of architectures. In one street you can see old style Queenslanders on stilts with wrap around verandas next to these large 80's brick family "mini-mansions" next to some 19th's Century old tudor home juxtaposed to the modern, boxy architectural mishap painted rotting eggplant purple.

I try to keep the homes realistic. You know, normal layouts, rooms a proper size. (Not a 2x3 bedroom or some obnoxiously large hallway.) Best way for that is to use real houses. Use http://www.houseplans.com/ for a variety of types. You can also try real estate websites, a lot have houseplans for getting ideas on how to do a layout.

With apartments, I go for New York style penthouses. Most suburban apartments having a pretty boring, cookie-cut layout. Nothing fancy. Those pre-war old style New York apartments have these really cool designs. Quite a few also have servants' rooms, and it looks like two different apartments attached at the kitchen. Really unique designs there.

Community lots differ. If it's a small town, I'd make them look like normal, local stores. Think Main Street, USA. Rows of shops. If it's a city, probably large department stores or have them up in skyscrapers. Like gyms or nightclubs in the penthouse.

Sometimes, it helps to work backwards. Decide what kinds of rooms you want and choose the furniture. Place the furniture in an arrangement you want, and build the room around it. Think of logical progression from room to room: Garage into mud/laundry/pantry into kitchen/breakfast/family into dining/living/front entry/powder room, maybe a more secluded study/library/office area. Bedrooms and family baths should be more secluded from the public areas of the home, although maybe the study doubles as a guest room at times. Obviously, some of this depends on size of family and how wealthy/poor they are. Even with mansions, I'd suggest more smaller rooms that the furniture fits, rather than enormous empty looking rooms. Sometimes, just bumping out one room one tile from the rest, and adding a bay window to a different room helps add dimension.

(And, sometimes those 2x3 bedrooms have their places, in tiny cottages for the kids, or in the mansions as individual rooms for the upper servants; the poor scullery maid gets a sleeping bag in the kitchen by the fire if she's lucky, in the scullery if not!)

This is usually how I build. I find that although I make a house suitable for my sims's needs at the time, the rooms often end up a little small. I need to learn to add a little extra space for expanding families and gaining extra items. I usually use this methods on smaller lots or on houseboats.

Definitely! Nearly all of my homes have been inspired by actual blueprints. There's some improvising due to the game's limitations, but starting out with a real set of plans is a big help. Not to mention lots of fun recreating it. :D

Also don't be afraid to experiment with Create a Style. That black-and-red pattern? Try changing it to gray and neon pink.

What's your Sim's favorite color? Maybe go for that, and colors that will coordinate (obviously I'm talking about decor here).

For example, for one girl Sim's room, I played with it...her favorite color is gray, so I took a gray and white pattern and used it for the bottom part of a wall. Then for the top part, I used the same pattern...but changed a couple of the colors to hot pink and black. For bedsheets, I might use one of those patterns for the bedspread and one of the solid colors for the sheets--or use a different design but in the same colors (helps to note the hexadecimal numbers).

If you're not in a hurry, play with it, recolor designs, and save them for future use.

I use house plans for all my residential lots. A great place to start is familyhomeplans.com. I also like houzz.com for interior and exterior design inspiration. I've always been interested in interior design though. It does help to watch tutorials; I was in major need of landscaping tutorials when I first started building. I try to make homes and community lots as realistic as I can, though I'm sure I don't always get there. My community lot buildings tend to be a bit boxy because that's what I see in my day to day life. They're a lot of fun to build though. Once you start creating homes and community lots that look good, you'll only create ones that look good (or at least decent) because you won't settle for anything less. It's a blessing and a curse. And it's fun (for me at least) to go over every detail and make it look just right. Not that I'm nearly as intensive as many builders, but I still enjoy it.

I really just base them off of houses I have been in or seen while walking/driving around. If you have a clear picture of the house, it really helps. Thats why blueprints are also very very useful, though I can never seem to find the one I want.

Look up a site of actual house blueprints. No, seriously. I often use blueprints as a gentle guide for the house structure. Real life is one of the best inspirations. I've uploaded houses here, the beach house I uploaded was based on a real beach house I've stayed in and pictures of others I've seen. Building a decent house takes patience and just all-around familiarity with build mode.

It kind of helps to get house ideas from blueprints, real houses, and even some other houses people have built, in any game, it will surely help.

There are many ways to build a floorplan, and I have studied some. Like in France I visited this place called Chenonceau, the original 1400 something floorplan has a square hallway on both floor with like 4 big rooms going from it, or like roman houses with rooms often organized around courtyards with the domestic features along the street and the house along an axis straight from the entrance to the end, in the end it has an open garden, then they have lots of hallways with no apparent purpose and tiny bedrooms in between.

In Louis Seize France they had lots of rooms on a row and the Kings private chamber at the end of it. Bedrooms was passthrough rooms as well as everything else, the closer you came to the Kings chamber in the end the more privilaged you were. In some of the villas in Rome they have one center room as diningroom and just general gathering room in the middle and rooms with more special purpose going along the walls. In one villa they had the room in the middle 2 floor high.

I have find my study of history and it's different floorplans quite useful. It also helps me do things differently from time to time.

I like grabbing copies of free real estate magazines they have in stores and apartment finders to get ideas for houses and room layouts. I like to build houses with very open rooms because too many walls being down tends to take me out of the game. I also like to have basements and attics for all of my houses. And I like for all of my stairs to flow. So I have to plan for all of them for every story of the house before I begin anything else.

I tend to have a type of house that I prefer to make and play in. Often townhouses with bay windows, flights of open stairs going from the basement to the attic. A car port, and a first floor comprised of den and kitchenette, bathroom, and a dining area. The second floor is the bedroom, entirely open. Because I like attics, I am very fond of dormers. My basements are made cutting out the middle section of foundation rather than building wall. I prefer it that way because using wall makes me see the ground and I hate that.