"Can't place stairs inside of foundation."

~Halle_M, I'm having the EXACT same problem. Plus it keeps complaining about some wall that isn't even there.
'moveobjects on' doesn't affect stairs so that doesn't work.

We need help. Does anyone have links to tutorials or have any practical experience getting these stairs in? There has to be a way...

Halle, if I find anything out myself, I'll be back to tell you how I did it.

Complaint: Why would EA allow foundations, create a thing for making basements, and then not create something that allows basements in houses with foundations? It's stupid really.

edit: blunote00 has some links in this thread

This is what usually works for me - I hope I can explain it right, it's a bit convoluted... :mrgreen:

I start by determining exactly where I want my stairs to be. Then I place a basement big enough to fit the stairs. Remember that you will need to place a short staircase from your foundation to ground level later!

Next thing I do is delete all the foundation where the stairs should be, and then one block more on all sides - so that's 5 blocks for the stairs and the landing, and when you go all around, it's a total gap of 3x7.

Then I place an ordinary wall all around where I want my stairs to go. Usually a 'room' of 5x1 is enough. You can place stairs from that foundation-less room into the basement.

Sometimes I have to delete one more row of blocks behind the landing and pull out the wall, so the 'room' is actually 6x1 (for some reason I sometimes get the 'blocked by wall' error, but not every time...)

Remove the wall, replace the foundation where you can, and place a short staircase from the foundation down to the landing of your basement stairs - otherwise Sims can't get to them.

I wish I could take pictures, but I can't get at my game disks right now...

~KarinL, that was helpful. I wish I would have seen your post before I went experimenting to make mine work. :| :P
I think I went about mine backwards.
I removed foundation area where I wanted the stairs to go, determined the depth needed for the basement and leveled the floor over to stairs area,
http://llnw.thesims3.com/sims3_asset/sims3_asset/media/shard000//shard000/322/764/007/00/screenshot_original.jpg"width=640"
...then used CFE cheat to drop the foundation to the basement level.

The stairs automatically dropped all the way to the foundation bottom when I replaced them on the house-level floor.I used the 'moveobjects on' cheat to place a door in the foundation wall at top&bottom...
http://llnw.thesims3.com/sims3_asset/sims3_asset/media/shard000//shard000/488/764/007/00/screenshot_original.jpg"width=640"
http://llnw.thesims3.com/sims3_asset/sims3_asset/media/shard000//shard000/484/764/007/00/screenshot_original.jpg"width=640"
...and to put stuff in the basement since it still complains that it's not a basement. But my sims can use the stairs/basement stuff with no problem, so I don't care if I have to use the cheat occasionally to move things.


Edits:added pics

The "stairs within the walls" trick worked for me. Many thanks!

Hello there I had the same problem intill I saw a house that had a basement with a foundation and after playing with it for a while I found a solution.

The house is at 12 Bogaard Lane in Bridgeprot (The Old and New Glam)

what you do is with any foundatoin first build the basement then add the stair case that goes to the "first floor"next made the foundation arround the stairs after that you have to add a smaller stair case to be usuable and that should work.

Enjoy

It took me a couple minutes but! I was having the trouble of placing stairs from the basement to ground level, the message "can not be placed inside foundation kept coming up which made no sense to me. There did use to be foundation but I took it all out. I went looking up about it and found NOTHING helpful. Just people talking about how to get stairs threw foundation which wasn't helping me. But it seems some of you also had the problem of just getting it to ground level in places foundation used to be. After a LOT of experimenting I discovered if you go to terrain tools, then flatten lot, it will forget pretty much about the old foundation and you are than able to place stairs. Hope this is helpful to anyone else who comes across this problem.

I rarely build a typical basement. I just go down one level and using the normal tools to make a normal room, I make the entire level a huge room. Then I figure out where I need to add my stairs and it works fairly easy. After that I split it up and design it any way I want. I've done it this way since I started playing Sims because I couldn't figure out how to make a proper basement in the beginning. I obviously know now but I still prefer my old way.

I hope this helps someone ?

"simplesims;c-6992062" wrote:
Is ther a video for this that explains this cause the written intrustions are confusing.

Same. If there were a youtube tutorial someone could do on this it would really help. The foundations and no basement ever problem really stinks. I end up having to have homes with no front steps, just a door opening flat to the ground which is crazy unrealistic where I live and makes a New England house impossible to build.

If this help, try to outline with walls on the level floor where the stairs are going to be beneath. Seems to help a lot with placing the stairs without the foundation seemingly getting in the way for no reason.

Hey folks, I'll be locking this thread to avoid further necro-posting as it's quite old.

Feel free to create a new thread if you'd like to start up the discussion again, thanks!