@mcrudd thanks for sharing the tutorials. You've inspired me to play around in build mode. I started building my irl house and I'm having so much trouble with roofs and fences lol - it's just not possible to make things exact. So I'm rolling with the differences and getting creative. It will be almost my house.
@WinterKhirin that's a good idea using MCCC to get nice townies. I like using story progression though, which means Sims will get married and their last names will change, thus sometimes resulting in duplicates after their name change. Not sure how to work around that.
Also wouldn't really work if you're trying to do everything yourself from scratch, though it might be fun to make a bunch of your own Sims and only include those in the tray that it will use. You'd have to make a lot of Sims though! That would be a challenge in and of itself.