Where Do Your Builds Come From?

I mostly just build from imagination. Sometimes I may take inspiration from real houses I see on the internet, but it's mostly the front side of the house, or sometimes it's a room I like, or I may check for design elements used if I am not familiar with the building style. I never follow floor plans or what not. 

Both. My very first build was created from watching a video on how-to build said house, along with help from my community while streaming. It was so fun and yet overwhelming trying to build while streaming. 
My 2nd build, I saw a picture and instantly wanted to build that house. I was amazed I could do it with just a single picture for reference while being so new to building, but I also had some terrific help from my community, and a friend who is great at building, created the floor plan. 
I have created several builds from imagination but also love looking at real homes on the market to get inspiration from. 🏡

QTSimz​  I'm more of the second half of your post. I see a house advertised, or on a TV show or while walking around and i immediately go and search to see if a listing comes up when i get home. My main bugbear are listings with no floor plan. If there's enough photos i can try and workout the layout from how many photos are available. 

For my recent build someone i know moved in to this house recently and they showed me some pictures of their new house on a recent meet up. I found the listing immediately when i got home but when i went to go and build it this week, the listing i had viewed a few months ago has now been closed and half of the pictures and floorplan are no more available. 

My builds are mainly from imagination, I like to build my houses and their floor plans around my sims personality or occult type 😁 the only inspiration builds I have done is my spellcasters home, the shape is based on terraced townhouses in London England, and I also, for fun, built the house I grew up in where mum and dad still live now 😀

That's brilliant that the real life owner of your in game sims home shared pictures with you so you could build it accurately, so cool😆

Wow so sorry you missed out on the listing. As frustrating as that can be, maybe you can come up with a terrific floor plan yourself, or if you are comfortable with it, maybe your friend would be very honored to learn you were building their house in Sims and send you the missing pics you need? 
I have found since my new interest in building, that I too will take more notice of homes I see in shows, movies, and instantly think about how they would look in Sims LOL! 

I do take inspiration from tv/internet/ irl for the exteriors of houses but I figure the inside layout and furnishings myself most of the time

just kinda always prefer to scale down cause it looks better to me and then the original layout no longer works 😅

also my sims need different items in their houses than anyone would realistically need in a house so 😅 function first.

=why add 10 closets if one itty bitty dresser does the job y know. keep the space for other fun big stuff...like microscope or whatever.

Simmingal​ The bottom half is me when i see a floorplan with loads of built in wardrobe space that our sims won't go in to in the game but i include all those spaces just to make the house look accurate then i may or may not get rid of them at a later time. Usually it's just four or five one tiled rooms with a few doors on it and nothing in them. 

I come up with my own floor plans. I think taking inspiration from real like could be useful, but I have only done so once and it was a build challenge and first time I built something in the sims 4 😄

Both: I like to build from scratch using my imagination, and I also like to build taking inspiration from real-life houses and floor plans. When I use real-life houses and/or floor plans as inspiration, I often adapt them to my own taste, for example by adding or removing some elements; but sometimes I like to take it as a challenge and try to make them as similar/accurate as possible 😊