2 bedrooms, a deck, 2 bathrooms (one's empty) costs $19,940 and has no lights also what kind of mods would get packaged into this?

more pictures
more

again

last one!



nighttime shot (also shows the changes):

A house with no lights is not acceptable if it's a starter .. the whole point of that is to have a *complete* house for under 20.000§. Also, I believe one of your bathrooms has no door. Your imageshack pics don't work for me so I can't comment on the other pictures.

For info on how to package lots, see the Creator Guidelines on the wiki; there's one specifically on lots and houses that covers everything you need to know. Lots that have game mods in the package will not get accepted here.

alright i'll cut down some of the features, my question about the mods is that i run a lot of them and I don't know if some would "contaminate" it
Alright I added lights took out a bedroom. currently just over 20k.

I believe the way to see if your package has any game mods (or anything else included that is unwanted) is to download (if you haven't already) the Sims2Pack Clean Installer and use that to check your file. The link I gave not only has the file to download, but also FAQs/manuals/quick-start-guides to show you how to check your file using the Clean Starter.

Hope this helps!

Thank you, It seems to be clean. I made a few more minor changes the second bedroom is back with only a single bed.

Glad to help!

Could you update your image?

Also, I don't know whether you know this or not, but if you hit (when in build/buy mode) R and then TAB, it gets arid of your toolbar for when you take photos. *thumbs up*

done sorta, my lighting is fine?

Lighting looks mostly fine cept the bedroom with a single bed. Perhaps another light on the other side of the room? That side seems a bit dark to me.

How much does the closet cost? I've only recently gotten Apartment Life, so I can't remember exactly whether the closet costs a good deal or not. Instead of the closet, maybe one of those clothing racks (the smaller versions of the type seen in stores)? They are the most inexpensive, I think. I would try down-sizing just a tad (to lower the price). For instance, you have a massive front hall. Your bathrooms are big, only one is furnished, and you only have a max of 3 people living on the lot. You could make the furnished one a tad smaller and turn the other into a very small bathroom with only a sink and toilet (2x2 room or 1x3 room).

These are the only suggestions I can make at the moment. It is very late for me. Maybe in the morning I'll have some more suggestions for improving your lot. This is a great start, though!

I think i'll do that with the closet, how would one downsize the hall? (it happens with all of my houses), I made the bottom bedroom bigger(to take up the space where the bathroom's original size was) i switched the second bathroom into a bedroom.

I agree that the middle hall is too big....actually..the overall proportions are a bit big. I love to build starters and the most expensive thing from a budget standpoint is actually the walls themselves...so my suggestion would be to pare dowm the overall size of the lot itself...shave everything down and bring it in a few squares. Make it to where the center hall is only 2 squares wide. I can see you are going for a certain proportion on the exterior..you can keep it..but on a smaller scale...instead of 3 square wide bay..maybe only 2 squares, for instance. The bathroom is very large...they really only need to be 3 or 4 X2 or 3 at the most...so you can take the house in from front to back as well as side to side. That would also accomplish a few other things....having slightly smaller rooms would make them not seem so empty with starter furnishings and also smaller proportioins would make your house cuter in general. For some odd reason..smaller=cuter in many cases

The suggestion from the other poster about the closet is right on the money. Starter houses dont really need any closets or dressers either, for that matter...spend the $$ on skill builders and stuff to make your build appealing. a dresser is a "nice to have" extra that my sims can worry about after they get a paycheck or two.

And if you really want to cut the budget so that you can have more stuff on the inside..you might consider cutting the deck area..that much fencing is a budget buster too...and the $$ could be used on exterior landscaping on the front which would make the lot appealing in your cover shot. How the front looks is more important than the back when it comes to first impressions.

Overall...you have a great start...I cant wait to see the finished product

should i shrink the lot size or just the house? also thank you.

Well, I don't know if you should get a smaller lot. I think that currently the house takes up most of the lot (at least on the one side and front). If you make the house smaller, it will leave more yard space for landscaping.

Things that are too big in my opinion: hallway (it could be 2x? like Ruthless suggested), secondary bedroom (the one with a single bed; you could make that smaller and could actually bring the hall around to take up part of the space along the outer front wall as a sort of alcove for a chess set or something in front of the windows; that would make the bedroom smaller) and the bathrooms. A 3x3 and a 1x3/2x2 (like I suggested) would be better sizes for the bathrooms.

I would also work on the roof. I would try using the individualroofslopeangle # cheat to bring that roof down a big. You might try # as 35 or so.

I think the kitchen and dining room are well-sized. The livingroom is a good size for the future, if one intends on putting lots of stuff in as the sims get salaries, but at the moment it looks a mite empty and large. Not sure what to suggest there. On the one hand it is too big and empty and on the other it is a good sized livingroom for future furnishings (like a piano or something).

If you like, I can start up Sims 2 and make an example house based on yours to give you an idea of some possible ways to decrease size and price. I personally find it hard to understand some suggestions people give when there is no visual aid (and showing you some example improvements with actual pictures might help). I'm the sort of person who does much better with visual aid.

One trick I do with lighting for starter houses is to use the $25 wall lights (bare bulbs) on interior walls--sometimes only in rooms that have furniture in them. The lights on interior walls disappear (except at a corner to the outside wall) and so do not look noticably ugly.
Another trick is to cut back on walls and fences. Often you can have a kitchen and diningroom as a single room, for example, and use visual cues like flooring to separate the rooms.
You can also leave space for a driveway, rather than actually put a driveway in .

You have a good base here, but there's definitely room for improvement.

Some cost-cutting tricks:

- Use terrain paint for the driveway and let downloaders add one later, when the sim can actually afford a car. Spray a big patch of (gravel, sand, etc) terrain paint all over the area where you want your driveway, then put the driveway down, then spray grass back on. Remove driveway. presto, neat-looking driveway area and $150 saved.

- Use cheaper flooring. Wood in the foyer looks great. You can get away with carpet in the main living area and TV room. Maybe pick a light colour, like the Hey Jute carpet, which looks great and is only $2/tile. I don't know what EPs you're using, but in one of the EPs there is a plain white linoleum that looks quite good - only $4/tile as compared to $6/tile for tile floors.

- I can't see if you've already done this, but use the wooden lattice foundation for the deck. You get the look of the deck flooring without spending $6 per tile. Also wooden lattice is $3 compared to $4 for brick foundation. Then, delete all the interior foundation - you don't need foundation except for the outermost border, as the floor tiles cover it anyway.

- If you don't think it would look too bad, use beachy keen paint or similar plain white-ish paint for the exterior. $3/wall instead of $7... that's 50% savings!

- Make the house a little smaller. You can afford to make it 2 tiles shorter and 2 tiles narrower. That will definitely make your interior look cosier and not so bare too. Here's how I would do it, I'm not saying you SHOULD do this, but I'll leave this here for you to think about. I made a picture as the description got too wordy.



That structure is about $13,500 (not including lot price, and with no landscaping) - without wall coverings but with the expensive concrete floor (I left it so you can see the grid). There are also some structural differences, not just budget ones - for example, I put the doors on the diagonal as you can't put objects there, but you CAN put objects on the straight walls.

Basically, cut corners where it's not important - e.g. expensive windows and doors - so you can have money to spend on what's important: skill-builders and other useful things. Look for cheap alternatives wherever you can. For example, the cheap $90 privacy windows for the bathroom instead of the more expensive space glass ones. Every penny counts when you're building a starter! Of course, you might want to pick one area in which to splurge, so you can make your house really cute. It's worth it to add one key, striking feature - but to afford that you must pinch pennies in other places.

I hope that was helpful and not too pushy. Good luck!