Stuck on save

I'm on a new save, building a house for my sims. Everything works super great and smooth, but the problem is that when I go to save i get stuck on the saving screen infinitely. I can close the game fine by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del and opening the task manager to close sims, but it's just really annoying and hard to make progress.

 I'm assuming the issue is that when I go to save, something isn't fully loaded in and it freezes the game. I've found that making a few changes in build mode, then waiting for my computer to sleep a little, then going back to save works better but it's still excruciatingly slow to get anything done.

I have CC and mods, which to be honest I totally need to clean out (I just don't know how lol) but other people that I found online that are having the same problem, had no CC and no mods so I'm not sure that it's the issue.

I only started having this problem after installing the Life or Death expansion pack. I know a lot of other people have been having bugs with the pack but the posts I read from my specific problem were from a couple of years ago. I'm not sure what to try next, please help if u can <3