EAxis House of Fail: September

[witch]

@SortofBoring. Unfortunately the particular windows you have chosen don't let much light in. The rooms are quite dim and there are places, like one of the stairwells, where there are no windows at all. Plus I would have put some larger windows and doors giving access to the back verandah on the ground floor. Over all the house has a nice South Western sort of look. It reminds me a bit of a rich cowboy's ranch house.

@Faizah. I love the look of the house, quite fantasy looking. Good use of different roofs too. The only comment I'd make is that on the second floor, the stair exit leads either through a bathroom or a bedroom, not very realistic or practical in terms of sim routing.

[Night Racer]

downlaod for original house dosnt work for me

The XML page cannot be displayed
Cannot view XML input using style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.

id use the one that came with pleaseantview...but i already remodeled that and i have a family living in it...and i whould rather not move them out



Edit by moderator: the red highlighting is fucking annoying.  Knock that shit off.

[keirra]

Did you really have to highlight that in red? I think I'm blind now.

[Faizah]

Hmm. Good point about the stairs, and that bathroom certainly doesn't need to be that large. Or have a door into the bedroom, come to think of it. I'll fix that. (And the chair placement.)

So, this is what I did:


The bathroom was made smaller, and a plant was put in the empty corner of the enlarged stairwell. Both only have doors onto the hall now.


The armchair was moved to beside the sofa.

Get it here.

[HomeschooledByTards]

@Quinctia: I'm doing a garage too, mine's going to have an upstairs apartment. I love the sunroom on the side.

@SortOfBoring: Love your study. I look forward to exploring it and the rest of the house.

@Faizah: There's a house in my town that looks similar to your design, its blue and only two stories though. I love the turret roof and the layout. I never have gotten the hang of the pointed/domed roofs.

@cockroach: I'll have my husband check the server logs to see if there's a problem on our end with the lot. In the meantime, use the directions I posted on Page 1 of this thread in response to MaayBee to get a copy of the house from the backups.

[Faizah]

There's a house with a turret along the bus route into town, I've passed it so many times. It's not pink or three stories either. Heh. Always wanted to live in a big old house like that. (The not-pink real one, not the pink one I made.)

I've always had trouble with those roof shapes, the turrets and the domes, they come out way too wide at the base. That turret is actually just a 1x1 square, with floor underneath to make sure it's weatherproof. I'll be honest, when I'm just building for my own use (which was always, until these House of Fail threads) I'll often bung an auto-roof on there and call it good enough.

I do try to keep the original roofing features if possible, the big roof with the window is almost the same as the lot's original roof there, just a floor higher and a bit shorter around the back. (When I realised I'd made the third floor short around the back I put in the second floor roof to fill the gap.) I weather-proofed the Pleasant Cordial house in the new hood, but I took off the roof to do it, and now I can't make it look like it did before. Rar.

[HomeschooledByTards]

This is the message I get when I try to download the house from post #1.

The XML page cannot be displayed
Cannot view XML input using style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An invalid character was found in text content. Error processing resource 'http://www.linuxbit.net/Sims2/EA_House_Challenge...

Sims2 Packager 1.0

This appears to be an Internet Exploder error message, I use Firefox which is why it's always been working for me. I've uploaded the file in .zip format.

Stupid Microsoft, instead of asking what a user would like to do with a file that it doesn't recognize it tries to display it (as a webpage, like XML or HTML). 

http://www.linuxbit.net/Sims2/EA_House_Challenge/105_Sim_Lane/Orig/105_Sim_Lane.zip

[Yecats]

I haven't started BUILDING yet, but I have 3 houses graphed out and ready to build.

It'll just have to wait till I get to the weekend and get a day off to do some hard-core simming.

I'll scan the plans tomorrow and post them up too.

[Faizah]

Okay, I've done another. It's big, it's ugly, it's ... big and ugly.

I rezoned this as an apartment, then noticed a bunch of things I had to change. Rar. I kept banging away at it, and made several changes since the taking of these photos. (Except the 2nd floor image, I had to retake that as one of my 'errors' was removing an original wall... again. But I took the photo before changing to an apartment, so the apartment doors don't show. Bah.)

I have this as a regular lot also, if anyone wants that. As before, all EPs, FFS and GLS. No CC.

Front:

Changes since photo: Cosmetic. Half wall with fence on top (via foundation-related trickery) instead of current fence. Current fence remains to fill the gap between half wall and lot boundary.

Rear:

Changes since photo: See Front, First floor.

First floor: Common area. Pool room, gym, spa, chess tables, bookcase.

Changes since photo: Doors added to back patio.

Second floor: Apartments 1 & 2, first level. Kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, lounge area.

Changes since photo: Changed placeholder doors to apartment doors.

Third floor: Apartments 1 & 2, second level. Nursery, bathroom, kids bedroom, open area.


Fourth floor: Apartment 3, bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, lounge, nursery.

Changes since photo: Bathrooms furnished. (The small rooms up the back with the black/white walls.) Kitchen walled off. Phone changed to cooler looking black phone. End bedrooms no longer bedrooms, but can be made so by the placing of a bed.

Roof: Common area, musical instruments. (See Front/Rear photos)

Download. Rent ranges from $2,323 to $2,556.

And ... that's it. I'm done. This lot was a monster to tackle on my craptastic computer. But that's my own fault, for making it so huge.

[HomeschooledByTards]

Okay, I've done another. It's big, it's ugly, it's ... big and ugly.

I quite like it. I love how it's got this old inner city vibe to the building. It looks like it would fit in well with both an older section of town for poverty challenges, and in a more affluent apartment complex without a lot of tweaking.

[ajcrawly]

My first attempt at re-making a house. I was thinking of making it a theme house where the top floor is "Heaven" and the basement is "Hell"  but I have to switch some things and restore the CC to my game and I have had enough of this house for tonight!  So this is the basic house.

Front of house

Back of house

Top floor

Main floor

Basement



download
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=c6d09d9a6bb6c22bab1eab3e9fa335ca53df296e50ead8a7

I have all the stuff packs, and all the expansion packs up to FreeTime.



**edit - I apparently forgot to put a door to the room by the stairs!

[Soggy Fox]

I think I'll be starting to do these too, since I've been planning on redoing all the EAxis houses anyway - they aren't bad, with ALOT of improvements.

[witch]

@ajcrawly. So, furnish it! Seriously, I don't know what other posters look for most, but I like seeing the decorating style as much as the building. In play it's mostly the inside that's seen. Plus it shares ideas on how to do different types of rooms - useful for me when it feels like everything I furnish looks just the same.

In fact my current apartment building is a challenge to me in just this way. I have four separate houses on a lot, each one furnished in a different style. One is modern, one's more an Eastern look, one will be quite old-fashioned and I'm not altogether sure about the fourth. I'm currently stuck on the Eastern.

So, you don't have to, of course, but I'd enjoy seeing what you'd do with the interior.

[ajcrawly]

As Witch requested, I furnished my house.  I also did a little tweaking after my sister offered me some advice, and after I figured out how to add windows to the basement. ( I like to try to figure things out on my own before I ask how to do it, so the windows in the basement were a little problematic for me- but I got it eventually. (Of course my sister looked at me like I was crazy when I explained how I did it - apparently there was an easier way - oh well!)).  I'm not going to re-post pictures of the outside because I didn't change it noticeably.

Top floor contains the nursery, the master bedroom, and the master bath.  {The bed is CC  and is the Round Bed Ginevra by Ronja - www.simenapule.it.  I like the way it looks, but unfortunately it eats Sims, so it may not be worth downloading.} (see below)  My sister also pointed out since the upstairs is open and noise travels I should put the sound-proof fence around it.  But for aesthetic purposes, I didn't.


First Floor contains the Kitchen, TV room, and a bathroom for guest usage.


Basement contains a child bedroom, a teenage bedroom, a reading area and a bathroom.



Download; http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=c6d09d9a6bb6c22bab1eab3e9fa335ca53df296e50ead8a7


*** EDITED  -- For some reason I had a lot of cra....um unwanted stuff with the original pkg file so this house has been tweaked.  The house no longer has any CC at all, and there are no longer any tagalong files when you download - except possible the phoneline controller.....

[kalina]

jesslla, I like the style of this house too Very nice pick.
I recently got the Ikea SP and the AL EP and I wanted to use some of the items in them, so I don't think I kept too much of the style. Here is what I did:
Front and back:

Layout:

First floor rooms:

Here is the house:
http://thesims2.ea.com/exchange/lot_detail.php?asset_id=745835
I had a lot of trouble trying to decide how to separate rooms on both floors, so I finally decided to leave it open.

[witch]

@ajcrawly - Nice. A good comfy family home with lots of room to breathe. The only comment is that the island counters you've used with the bar stools won't work because sims like to get behind them to pick dishes up. You might have to put a dining table out in the main room. Weird, your pictures seem to have vanished.

@kalinagn. Great, another large family home. I like the symmetry of the layout and the spaciousness. I like the little touches too, like the books on the endtable.

[ajcrawly]

Witch - I'd done some rearranging at photo bucket and I'd forgotten to update the links. Hopefully they are showing up now?

[Yecats]

My first attempt.

I don't like this house much.  I made it bigger, but it's just not my sort of house.

Download: 105 Sim Lane_1.rar

Front of house:


Backof house:


Yea, I kinda thrashed the sports activity and playground objects a little - but I hate sims that do nothing.

Bottom Floor:


The pool was originally ment to be level with the rest of the flooring, but it wanted it on terrain.  So terrain it got.

I don't like the half-walls + full walls thing going on in walls-up mode, but it was literally the only way I could think of to get natural light into that pool area.

Top Floor:


Spawning room, Childs room, two teen rooms and a master bedroom.  They have to share a bathroom (hahhahah!).


Additional notes:
I don't like the AL wardrobes all that much - if you don't put a wall behind them they are just open.  I would prefer they were like the photo booth crossed with the dressers - you get a solid object with Woohoo and clothing functions.

There are no lights in the house other than what it came with.  I got annoyed and forgot them.

Not play-tested.  I stole the fountains in the pool idea from a previous challenge.

[jim]

I've deliberately held off looking at this thread till now, so I've some catching up to do.

@Faizah: Your first house is amazingly like my aborted attempt at a traditional house. I like the way you've varied the roof: it's a roofer's nightmare, but very authentic.

@AJCrawly: This is another house where I'd happily move into the basement.

@Kaligagn: I like the cool blue theme you've got going, and the fact that the house actually looks lived in.

@Yecats: Your pool is great.  It tickles me that we were all moaning about having a pool in the living room  with the Haven house, and now we seem to be converts.  I would have liked to see witch's hammerhead suspended over it. I know what you mean about this not being your kind of house.  I felt the same way, and gave up halfway through.  There are virtually no traditional wall coverings I like, and the walls influence what you do with a room so much, that it's hard to keep working on a room that's looking heavy and dark.

My own offering - 105 Jim Lane Revisited

Revisited several times, primarily to add a visitors' bathroom downstairs (pace, Emma), lighting in the kitchen and a phone - just a few little inessentials.  Duh.

This started out as a traditional, heavily furnished, relatively dark Victorian house, in keeping with the original facade. It just looked too gloomy and cramped, so I ended up going too far the other way and overdosing on windows. Unusually, I put big windows and floor to ceiling mirrors in the bathroom, with no curtains.  My playtester Sims, exhibitionists one and all, don't mind stripping off for the neighbours at all. However, I've stuck a big tree outside to thwart the peeping toms, just in case the pixelation ever fails.

This is a two bedroom, two and a half bathroom (eventually) family house, which conforms to awesomespecs, so far as I can tell.  The garden looks a bit messy, with monkey bars and a tent etc., but the kid loves it, so the Garden Club will just have to lump it. There's room for a greenhouse near the pool, but it will also fit a football goal, or a basketball hoop, if you prefer your food non-sparkly.

Front and garden side:



Back and pool/play side:



First floor layout:



Master bedroom and bathroom:


I obviously still had move objects on when I snapped this. You might want to bring the bedside table all the way into the room.

Kids' bedroom, on an arctic theme, which I think will be appropriate in winter, with those windows:



Family room:



Ground floor layout:



Dining room:



The smallest kitchen ever - Sims have invented a new holiday dance, the 'Kitchen dos à dos':


It does have lights now.

Hall, seating, bar and the one desk:



I have all EPS and no SPs.  The lot comes in at $157,393, unwanded.

Available here: http://tinyurl.com/6meuwp

[Alex]

Jim that's fantastic! I love the modern feel of house. The "arctic" theme for the kids bedroom is also very inspired and unique. *steals idea*

[Quinctia]

I love the windows on that, jim.  It's funny, I always seem to enjoy the looks of other people's modern lots, but I never think to use the style very often myself.  I also think the way that kids' room is decorated is adorable.

[MaayaBee]

@Jim: I really like the modern theme of the house and love the windows you chose for the stairwell (is that from AL? Ugh... must wait a little longer). Anyhow, the thing that made me giggle is the fact that you put huge cabin bear into a kids' bedroom. Don't know why, it just seems funny to me.

[Yecats]

It seems we're all keen on using the stairs in that little bay-window type thing.

Nice place for them though.

[jim]

Anyhow, the thing that made me giggle is the fact that you put huge cabin bear into a kids' bedroom. Don't know why, it just seems funny to me.

I predict all his huggy squeezy bits will be bald, and they'll call him George.

[witch]

Jim, you have the touch all right! I see you've fallen for those new windows too. I just love this lot of yours. So light and airy, cool and calm.