Edit: Another problem, with no eagerness to start yet another thread..
How do I go about packaging a lot that's inhabited without losing the furnishings? I've tried having the last person get invited to a neighbor's house and move in, but when I went back to the now-unoccupied house, everything was gone. Grah.
Attempts to package the lot and remove sims via Clean Installer resulted in a lot that places fine, but crashes the game any time I attempt to open it.
Inge has a StayThingsShrub on her website. I've used it with BV. As long as you don't mind the lot value being fubared. (Way less than it should be, from what I've observed.) You'll have to put a sim into the lot long enough to place the shrub and set it to keep objects at move-out.