Blueprints for houses?

I always make up my own. For me that's part of the fun! I love floorplans and designing them is heaven for me. :)

I don't bother with plans because they often have features that don't translate well into sim buildings. Sometimes, I look up houses on google with some nice exterior features I like and then create my own plans from there according to some common sense design rules and keeping sims behavior in mind.
Large houses with more than one or two sims will get at least two tiles of traffic space for hallways, stairs, around furniture in common rooms and such, etc. Think of the hallway as the main artery of the house as it receives most traffic.
Living room where you receive guests will be placed close to entrance.
Dining room will be placed next to kitchen.
At least one bathroom on each floor if the house is large.
Baby/toddler room is preferably placed downstairs.
Matching windows for the entire house and usually only one wall gets windows in each room.
Matching doors for the entire house and usually one door per room.
Place fences, doors and gates where needed to restrict access.
Place furniture and rooms in such a way as not to obscure the view when playing.

I have several books, of Victorian floor plans, copies of the originals, for when I want to use an existing plan. Doesn't take long to learn the principles and go from there. Have sometimes used places I have lived in.

I get them on Redfin.

"MVWdeZT;c-18265537" wrote:
If you like mid-century modern, try looking up Sears House Plans. During the 20s and 30s, Sears would send out kits so you could build your own home. @ShaddBoi put a bunch of houses based on some of them up on the gallery, but you can also find just the plans online.

I followed your advice and found a lot of Sears plans online, now I am having fun trying to make the houses.
It is a challenge to try and keep to the plans and make them usable for Sims. Some of the earlier homes never even had indoor plumbing.
I have made 10 so far, Thank you for the suggestion, this is more fun than winging it {my houses tend to get too big}. :)

A few of the houses I have made are from houses I have been in or lived in. A few are just things I made up, thinking about some of the houses in sims 2 that I liked. I have also taken some off the gallery and changed to my liking.

I'll look up floor plans online if I can from real estate listings, or trying to make Sims versions of the houses I and my childhood friends lived in (though the inability to make walk-out or partially-submerged basements hurts in that regard).

There's also a ton of old catalogues of home and building plans on the Internet Archive, and some of them, usually older ones, can be downloaded without an account.

Currently, I'm working on some homes out of the 1955 Book of Easy To Build Homes 2nd Edition, published by the Home Plan Book Company.

I mostly just make it up as I go along but as I now have accounts on various property websites due to being in the process of buying a flat, I will definitely have to look at blueprints more for sim builds.

"Ersa_Middleton;c-18270488" wrote:
I can't ever properly translate a real life housing plan to a building plan in sims 4. The dimensions tend to either lead to rooms that are too big, or rooms that are too small.

Try using 3 feet per square (the TS1 standard). Have been doing that, sometimes with some tweaks if a room dimension is not divisible by 3, for years now and it's worked fine,

I'm also in team no multistory houses with @simgirl1010 and @joRN1414, I have my whole SaveFile online with all 1-story buildings. As most floorplans are multistory and TS4 has quite some special requirements if you want your Sims sit down to eat and and not wash their dishes in the bathroom, I tend to make up floorplans on my own if I'm not just sizing EA Houses down to be 1-story.