Build a house or get one off the gallery?

I'm more of a decorator than a builder so I def make use of the gallery a lot but I also find myself griping while I edit the house to my liking.

I started building my own houses. There is very few houses in the gallery that matched what I needed during game play.
Plus I find the build option more fun when you get to play around.

I pretty much always build my own homes, but they are usually squares so if I wanted something fancier I'd get something off the gallery.

Now that we have the gallery I build a lot less than I did when we only had the exchange. It's just so much easier to download a house that is close to what I want and fix it up to my liking.

I am super, super picky and a perfectionist. I like the house to be open, airy, no squishy tiny rooms. Everything has to go together, the style, colors, so I use a lot of CC. I don't want to use the same things over and over.

Why isn't there a "neither" option? I get them off the gallery, but then pretty much mutilate them beyond recognition.

I always grab a house plan off the internet... I particularly look for historical homes and recreate them to my liking. Victorian mansions or plantation houses with winding stairs and rounded rooms are difficult to recreate in ts4. I don't really play ts4 because I find it so lacking and shallow, but I still occasionally use it to design or recreate houses.

It depends, really. I enjoy building and I do use many of the things that I build but there are home styles that I am just not up to building (like complex Victorians). In that case I download a house shell in the style I want and use that. I download a lot of shells anyway (never furnished homes anymore) because I enjoy decorating them for fun.

It depends on what type of house. I enjoy building UK Tudor houses (windenburg style) and sulani builds myself but I can’t build any decent mansions, Spanish or southern USA (gone with the wind) type homes which are ones I will download off the gallery. I am getting better at modern builds and will attempt them myself.

If the house if for sims I'm going to play, I almost always build. But if it's just a house I want to fill a vacant lot for some NPCs, I usually grab one from the gallery.