More Awesome Than You!

OK. My sim will eventually get married and move in with her man. I don't want her to take the furnishings I put in her house since I want to use it as a starter house. I didn't remember that I should have built the house in "neighborhood mode" until I was done with the whole house. :P

Question: Is there a way to leave the furniture behind when she moves? ???

You could package the lot while still furnished and occupied.  Then use the clean installer to install only the lot fragment, which will give you a furnished house to pop back in the neighbourhood (over and over and over if you have NL).  Otherwise Inge's stay things shrub would be the way to go.

That's a slightly messy answer since it causes the lot slots to be used up. The Ingelogical shrub leaves attributal garbage on objects causing their costs to become corrupted. The "clean" way to do it is to backup the lot file, then after you move out, revisit it in build mode, save it, quit, and restore it back.

Is there some sort of limit on the number of lots you can have?

Messy or not, it's EASY, and that's why I do it that way.  Not that I do it very much at all, though.

Why is it necessary to revisit it in build mode and save it?  What I've been doing is moving the new family in, saving, then going out the game and replacing the lot with the previously saved one (with the furnishings intact).  Sounds more sensible your way actually, that way they have to pay full price instead of getting a freebie.  Not sure why you need to do the build mode part first, though?

Because for some bizarre reason, the furniture isn't actually stripped at move (and if you forget, you can quickly run and backup the lot as a result), even though the price of the house will reflect no-furniture, but instead when you revisit or move back in. Then the results are only committed if you then save.

Curiously, the removal of all furniture from the lot has been known to increase the lot size. The logic of this escapes me.

If I may expose myself to ridicule and contempt for a moment, I'd like to share a computer naif's way of handling the question of keeping the furnishings in a house while moving the sole resident out, although there may be some serious conssequences that I am not aware of. I keep a couple of Sims in the Sim bin to move into a house so that the current occupant can move out without any loss of furniture. In my game it's Don Lothario and the Calientes. I moved them out of their houses when I started playing, and I use them for situations like this. I just move them out of the house again after I've moved in other Sims that I want to live there.

I know this is a non-awesome way of handling it, but since they're not real people I figure it doesn't matter. I know it's better to understand the mechanics behind the game and handle it that way, but this is a crude shortcut for people who can't manipulate the mechanics.

JM. How do I know which file is the lot file I need to back up?