Blueprints Home Plans Inspiration

i know how you feel.you could always look up actual house plans and go based off of those.kinda like this maybe ? https://www.houseplans.com

I also have used houseplans but with improvement I have started building houses without houseplans.

I think everyone starts out with massive houses and one way I prevented that was by placing cheap furniture then placing the free floors under it to map out the general sizes, the build walls. It stops you from using bigger spaces than you need.

This is the house I made with a house plan

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc118/Model-Kylie/Screenshot-28_zpseekze7hl.jpg
http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc118/Model-Kylie/download_zpsnfgnsmnx.png

http://www.familyhomeplans.com/plan_details.cfm?PlanNumber=50323#image-slideshow

I don't use other people's floor plans so much, but I do often make my own floor plans ahead of time and layout everything before I start building in the game. Graph paper is perfect for this.

I used to have a problem with box shaped houses. Then I realized it didn't really bother me that much, its just what I tend to prefer. But I grew up in an Eichler so I'm rather partial to mid-century modern architecture, and honestly I'm pretty fond of the ultra modern styles in ITF too.
To be a little more clear, open floor plan, tends to require a rather large chunk of fairly box shaped house.

If I build a house from scratch, I usually always start with a foyer/entryway that will have enough space for fairly large stairs/tube elevators, and depending on the size of house, hallways branching off, and go from there. One helpful trick in making it look more house-like, is to make the rooms based on how much/what furniture it will have, and making sure your sims will have enough space in the room to interact without having to run across the house to the nearest empty space big enough for whatever animations they need to perform.

I have made houses based on houses that I actually know. This was something I did a lot less pre TS2, especially in the TS1 days and early TS2 days and sometimes I actually find it hard to build without planning in advance :#

Right after I had brought The Sims 3, I had built a house in my game from a blueprint that I found online. I had a list of different sites for blueprints saved to my Favorites list. Then I had to replace my PC, so I had lost the house that I built but I still have the design for it as I had copied it to graph paper for later use.

I ended up building houses that I am familiar with such as my childhood home, my grandmother's trailer and my in-laws house. I have built houses without planning them out as they just pop up in my head on how I want to do them.

I have a few house plan magazines that I am hoping to use as the basis for some buildings in the Sims. Before I bought the Sims, I actually had a house plan design program and would use the houseplans to play around with building things. It was a lot of fun. I have also found books at my local Library with houseplans, so that might also be a good place to look.

I use the blueprints in Sims 3 mostly for Resorts, as I'm normally too distracted with other things to bother making a decent resort from the beginning :wink: As I gather funds, I go back and adjust, but I find the blueprints help create a basic shape to start from.

These are 2 of the houses I build using online blueprints, so it helps a lot. The only hard part is the measurements but you have to wing it so it looks good in game

Another solution is to have your boxy house - which is a perfectly legitimate style - and do other things to make it seem less boxy. Add a covered porch or pop out the entry, decorative elements on the roof like pop-out gables (whether you have an upper floor or not), or just take one room or one section of a room and bump the wall out one square to break up a long wall. If you have a second floor, offset some of the walls (out or in) for different effects. You can have a perfectly square main floor but if you have a very different layout on your second that will really break up the visual impact.