Ha, viewing from atop makes dimensions a bit easier. It's quite easy to make rooms way too big if the building is not setting the limits. One way to avoid that is to place a few object in the rooms while planning the floor plan. Then you will get a better understanding of the size of the rooms. In this game it takes forever walking through a large build, and I try to avoid that they waste most of their lives walking... I think my build is rather small for a royal estate, but thee is still way too much space to fill. Now I'm just glad I did not make it even bigger :)
I too have used the sims game to support my writing. Especially in TS3 I often created the characters in the game, traits etc helped me finding personality structures.
