Building/Buying a House - The Sims 2 Guide - IGN (2024)

Building/Buying a House

Sims have to live somewhere. Like in the first game, it's cheaper in the long run to "pre-build" a house. That is, you build your house however you want before moving a Sim in, instead of moving the Sim into an empty lot and building a house then.

The reason is because of the automatic depreciation of the value of the house. Walls are expensive, and trying to build a house will completely destroy your budget. By building a house beforehand, it loses some of its value (and therefore its price) before your sim gets a hold of it. And that, trust us, is what you're going after.

That said, flora now contributes to the value of the house. So, if you go tree or flower happy, you'll be shelling out huge cash for the same house. Because of that, you need to be very careful with what you build. You'll start with 20,000 Simoleons, and trust us, that's not too much. We'll talk about advanced strategies with house building later. Right now, we'll only cover the basics.

If you're not interested in building houses, the game ships with a few empty houses ready to put down. Simply click the Lots button on the UCP, then select the Lots & Houses bin. A couple houses there are too expensive, but even the smallest ones will at least give you an idea of how to arrange houses. Simply select one, plop it down, and move your Sim in (explained below) to get started quickly.

But assuming you want to get your hands dirty, the first thing you need to do is get a lot. Again, click the Lots & Houses building, but click the second button there called Empty Lots. There you can select the relative size of your lot, from 3x5 to 5x5 and everywhere in between. Remember that you're paying for the land too, so getting a 5x5 lot will give you a lot of room to expand, but not too much to begin with. On the flip side, taking a 3x5 lot will give you a decent little house, maybe even with wallpaper; but you won't have much room to move, except upwards, and that gets expensive in a hurry.

Kelly won't have much to do in the beginning, and she'll want to expand. She chooses a 4x4 lot, which is a little pricy, but gives a decent starting cash influx. Select your size, then put it anywhere in your town. Make sure the lot is pointed at a road (the footprint will help you), and click when it's where you want it. You're then given the chance to name it, and you may do so with whatever you want. Some gamers call it by a road name, some call it something else. Kelly chooses to call it the National Compound, as you can see. Make sure it's a residential lot (community lots will be explained later), then click the check button.

Now, without having anything else selected, click the lot you just made. You'll be given a little description of it. Click the button with the house and arrow to go to the lot proper. You'll be taken to the grassy plain that is your land. It might be a little hilly, but that is one thing you can alter that won't affect the lot value. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Okay, first, you need to make a small decision. Do you want a foundation for your house? It makes the houses look more realistic, but a little more expensive. Kelly is all about what's aesthetic, so she does the foundation thing. Do that by clicking the Build Mode button, which is the third button on the UCP, one with a saw and a paint roller. This gives you all the tools you need to build your dream house!

Now, while you're pre-building your house now as you are, you have unlimited funds. There are two methods to build a house: the first is to build only as little as you need, check the price, and add to it as your budget holds out. The second is to build as much as you want ideally, then cut away what you need to get the price under 20K. Either method is fine; we recommend the latter.

The foundations are naturally under the Foundations & Decks sort, which is the bottom-left button of the ten. The National Compound uses the standard brick foundation, so we lay a 15x15 foundation. This is far more than needed, but again, you don't have to worry about price here, and can waste cash. Make sure that when you lay it down, you leave some room toward any sidewalks near you. That way Sims won't get jammed up when they come knocking down your door.

Okay, now for the walls. It's ideal to have a living room, kitchen, dining room, bathroom, and bedroom. Because Kelly is single, she won't need separate rooms for everything; we'll combine the kitchen and dining room together. Remember, parties come later, and right now, we're more concerned about getting her in a house that she can simply survive in.

Remember that a house is not exclusively good based on size. A house with the bathroom at one end, the kitchen at the other, and a huge hallway linking them is very inefficient. Think about how real houses are built: usually, the bedrooms are farthest from the door because those rooms are used the least. The living room is usually close (if not attached) to the front door, and the kitchen is close by that. The bathroom, if there's only one, is centralized.

Also realize that room size plays a vital role in planning the house. Bathrooms are small, living rooms are large, and kitchens are usually somewhere in between. The way I imagine the Compound is to have a kitchen in the far corner, a living room attached to it, a bedroom on the opposite corner, and a bathroom attached to all three.

In order to get those plans turned into something tangible, you need walls. After laying the foundation, click the button near the selection of foundations that, like the Build Mode button, has a saw and paint roller on it. That will take you back to the ten main categories of Build Mode. Click the Wall sort, which is in the top-left corner.

Inside that are two options: single walls, or rooms. Always choose single wall, because whenever you hold down the SHIFT key, it BECOMES the room tool. Saves a bit of time that way. Start by holding SHIFT and drawing out the outline of the living room. It should be roughly 5x5 to 7x5, as this one is.

The view may make it a bit tough to see, especially if you started with a near wall. To remedy that, we're going to change the camera to make the walls almost entirely disappear. Click the button in the UCP near the Floor Up button… It currently has a box that looks like a room with the walls cutaway, representing the camera angle. Click that, and then select the plain no-walled box, which removes almost the whole wall from the camera's eye. Don't worry, the wall is still there.

Easier to see, huh? Now build the kitchen about 5x5 off the living room, and the bedroom about 4x4 on the other side. Finish it off by building the bathroom in the intervening space. Here's the finished product…

If you set Shadows to be on in your graphics options, the interior is awfully dark. That too will be fixed soon enough. Right now, though, we need to clean up the lot. All that extra foundation is needlessly expensive, so return to your foundation tool. Click any foundation, then go back to your house. Hold the CTRL button, which basically turns whatever tool you've got into a delete tool for that thing, and highlight the parts of your foundation you don't need. After releasing the mouse button, you'll have a clean, cropped house. (You may have to do this a couple times if your house takes a turn, like the Compound does.) If you make a mistake, just hit the undo button in the bottom-left near the UCP itself to fix it. Just remember to take your time here: you're not under any time or financial pressure.

Now for what I think is the most exciting part of a new house: the front door! You need to strategically place it so it's centralized without being TOO in the middle of the action. Remember that you can always move it later, but mistakes mean money down the drain. A good place is to put it about one or two tiles away from the front corner of the building on the kitchen side. I'll show you the perfect spot for the Compound's door in a sec.

To get to the door tool, go back to the main ten tools of Build Mode. The door tool should be obvious to you. Click it, then check out all the doors available. Good selection, huh? If you care enough to, think ahead to what you think your house will be like. Will be a log cabin? Aluminum siding side street low-class house? Stone like castles? Brick ranch? Or do you not care?

No matter what, select the door you think most suits your needs, but do so by clicking AND HOLDING on the door. This will bring up a menu where you can customize it. The Compound is intended to be made of stone at least on the first story, and a wooden door with a glass window would suit that perfectly. After finding the best door, clicking and holding the mouse button brings up the menu in the screenshot. A dark wood and a simple glass window does the trick, so that is placed in the location I determined earlier. Also be sure to place doors connecting all your rooms, unless you specifically do not want certain rooms connected.

Notice that the door made a tiny deck if you had a foundation? We'll take care of that in a moment.

Okay, we're getting somewhere now, and you can probably start to see your house coming together. Let's get carpet and wallpaper down now. Carpet is easy because the wall view is already down, so it'll be a snap. This part is definitely based more on the house owner than anything any guide could tell you. Although it plays into the theme of your house, if you have one, a lot of homes have interiors that don't match their exteriors; they may even have interiors that don't match other interiors!

The Compound will be setup as such: light carpet in the living room, dark carpet in the bedroom, linoleum in the bathroom, and tile in the kitchen. Simply go to the Floor tool in Build Mode, which is right next to the Door tool, and take a look at the catalog, which is sorted by type of material. The expensive floorings WILL increase the value of the lot, so choose with caution.

Tip:

You can hold SHIFT to carpet an entire room at once.

After that, you need to choose your wallpaper. That tool is beside the Floor tool you just used, and it too is sorted by material. You may have to put the wall view to Walls Cutaway for this (the view you had when you started out building). Rotate the camera how you need to via the curved arrows in the center of the UCP. You can use the SHIFT trick for this too to get the whole room. Typically, all the homes in Pyroville have a light/dark combination: either the carpet or wallpaper is dark, and the other is light. Again, house beauty and coordination is in the eye of the beholder, so do what you think looks right for your purposes.

Here's some updated shots of the Compound, post-carpet, then post wallpaper…

Next we have to take care of the exterior. Put the walls in Walls Up mode, and check out that wallpaper again. Look for something that fits the exterior of the house. You can even paint over the bricks foundation for a completely new texture look.

To round out the whole package, we need a roof. You can actually make a roof simply by making another floor, but using flooring instead of an actual roof. That's great for flat roofs, but you don't see many of those aside from shops (which we'll build later). Besides, that costs money (adding to the house cost), but standard slanted roofs don't cost anything. There's an auto-roof tool, which is probably your best bet, because the manual roof tools are finicky at best.

Either way, you need to select the Roof tool. Be sure your wall mode is on Roof View, then select the Roof tool, which is under the Wallpaper tool in the main ten. Select one of the auto-roof options like the Compound has, or try one on your own. You may have to go up a floor to see the actual change. After the roof is added, be sure to put another wallpaper around the new parts of the house that were created. Here's the updated shots, first the front of the house, then the back…

Okay, we're almost finished. If you notice, the front door is still on a deck that's above the ground. We'll fix that by touching up the exterior. First select the Staircase tool, which is on the far right of the top row of the Build Mode tools. The top option there is to make staircases that actually connect to other floors. We don't need to worry about that; select the Connecting Stairs tool, which is left of the bottom row. Select a style you like, then attach it to the deck by a simple mouse click. (You'll have to make sure your cursor is on the deck itself, not the grass below.) If you wish, select the Railing tool beside the Connecting Stairs tool to make a railing. Unfortunately, the style of the railing and the style of the stairs MUST match. Touch it up with fences or something, and you'll have a nice tiny deck. That will be extended in the future.

To round out the look, extend a sidewalk from the end of the stairs to the city sidewalk. Do this by going to the Floor tool and put down a small line of sand, concrete, or anything else you may like. While you're at it, turn that sliver of a deck into an actual deck with the Foundation tool, and add a bush or two for color. Soon, you'll have something like the screenshot below.

The final, final things we need for building the house are windows. Go back to the Door tool and select the Windows sort. Usually, there's a symmetrical quality to the way doors are setup in the house, but only artists are anal about that kind of thing. Set your windows how you want, and then view the house externally from a Walls Up or Roof View mode.

Here is the finished product of the Compound…

Cool huh? And congratulations on yours too! But as nice as it is, we still need to furnish the darn thing! And that requires a whole separate tool.

But before we do that, there's something extremely important you need to do. As the old gaming adage goes, "Save early, save often." You may not have saved yet, and you don't want to do all that hard work again. Click button in the UCP that has three horizontal dots. That leads to the options menu, where you can change any graphics, audio, or gameplay settings that you may need. You can also click the disk icon to save the house on the lot.

With the game saved, you'll begin the really fun part, and one that won't need too much detail for due to how subjective it is.

Sims have eight essential needs, which we'll dive into more detail later. You can really only buy for six of them, so here's a shopping list for you:

• Refrigerator and at least a toaster oven
• Entertainment source, preferably a TV
• Bed
• Toilet
• Shower

The other things you SHOULD buy are:

• Burglar alarm
• Smoke alarm (unless you plan on having your Sim get good at cooking)
• Dining table with at least one more chair than you have people in your family
• Loveseat or sofa for wherever the TV is
• One sink in the bathroom for washing hands
• One sink in the kitchen for washing dishes

Getting anything else, even lamps, is not necessary for now. Let's just stick with what I mentioned. After that, we'll go back to the neighborhood screen and see how much it is. So, go to Buy Mode by clicking the second big button of the UCP, the one with the chair and lamp.

Buy Mode is divided into major categories: Sort By Function, Sort By Room, and Collections. We won't worry about Collections until much later in the guide. The other two lead to the same items, but you may prefer one method over the other. If you're fairly new to The Sims, try sorting it by Room to get a feel for the items. Check out the Function sort to browse the items. Both sorts have sub-sorts to help you out narrow down the exact thing you want.

Once you're done furnishing your house however you see fit, click the Options button of the UCP, then click the button with four houses to return to the neighborhood screen. Single-click the house you built, and…

Ouch! New Sims only have 20,000 Simoleons, and the Compound costs over 23,000! Now comes the minor difficulty: now the trimming. You have to figure out what to get rid of to get the cost of the lot low enough to buy it.

Now, there are some items that should not be sold. You can't have a house without a toilet, after all. Most of the items you bought in Build Mode, however, are expendable. As uncomfortable as it may be, a house with no wallpaper or windows is still a livable house for the short-term. Don't worry, it will grow eventually; you need to concentrate on simply moving in for now. While you're at it, get rid of items in Buy Mode like multiple items that perform the same function. For example, the Compound has both a TV and a Radio. As I mentioned earlier, since they perform the same function and the radio is cheaper, the TV shall go. You may only need a microwave instead of an oven, and try to avoid a food processor because it won't be necessary early.

Bingo. As you can see from the screenshots, the oven and TV have been removed, along with the food processor and all internal wallpaper. Windows are gone as well, so Kelly will be in perpetual darkness. But that too will change eventually. The cost of the lot is 19,636, giving her just under 400 Simoleons in reserve. That's good enough!

So now click the Families button on the UCP, select your family, and then click the lot you made. After a quick confirmation, your Sim will be in its new home!

On to How to Read a Sim...