Kudos to Sandraelle!

Last year I wanted to build a nice house for my one and only family in my one and only save. It was a 10-generation challenge and they had tons of money. My building skills consist of a large box with sufficient bedrooms. They all looked terrible. So someone directed me to take a look at Sandraelle's houses.

I did and was blown away. She includes the floor plans in the pictures of her houses. I have never been much of a downloader of any custom content and shy away from it (and wasn't even sure how to do it). So I used one of her floor plans and built a fabulous house for my family, wall by wall, floor by floor, using the CAS for the first time to customize it. It was a work of art thanks to Sandraelle.

Jump ahead a year. Now I'm playing a new save using NRaas so I can play rotationally. I started with six families all from meager funds. They all got small prebuilt houses to start raising their families. As the families have grown, some of my Sims decided to get a genie lamp to help things along financially. There was only one large house in the city and one of my Sims moved there (before finding out it was haunted!). As my families have grown and started to have more money, there are no decent large houses to move them to. I mean I have a football superstar who is coming into his own and he still lives with his family in a tiny little two-bedroom cottage. That's not very fitting for his fame.

So I went back to where Sandraelle has her houses. There is no way I wanted to spend 4-5 months building each house I need. I decided to give downloading a try. I found a few houses my families might like, got them into my library and figured out how to put one in my city. It's stunning (Harwood House)! I went into the build mode to check it out. Found out the house would cost my Sims over $800k to buy. Ok, that's not gonna work. I mean they are doing pretty well but $800k? No problem though. I can take a few things out to get the price down. Sold off the cars and motorcycle and it's down to $700k. Still too much. So then I start looking at details. Surely I can get that price down to their level. But you know what? The details of this house are incredible. I can't bare to delete a single thing. If I make it unfurnished, my Sims can afford it but I can't bare to do that to this house.

So Kudos to Sandraelle for building such amazing houses. I have a feeling all six of my founding families in my town will end up in one of your homes.