Can someone help me with my house layout? the main issue i've always had is the stairs and hallway like i'm not that good at building rooms around it or making hallways, i've definitely got better at building houses in general but i still can't make good stairway areas and hallways, a lot of you create nifty layouts for houses but i just don't have the eye for it like you guys, please can anyone help me with a layout with a better stairs and hallway area? it's a simple layout shape really but no matter where i put the stairs for every house i do i just never ever like it, it looks terrible and the hallways are really boring. House Layout Photo Here

Have you tried using a floor plan? Or looking at floor plans of similar shaped houses? I would figure out your floor plan first at least to some degree. The fact that the house is a very wide, mostly boxed shaped structure is making it harder for you to know where to place the stairs.

A picture here in the post zoomed in to cut out all the grass would also be helpful.

Yep i just can't find any good ones, i'm doing it based on This House but it's huge, they have a lot of 1 floor houses im parts of America because of their house planning regulations but i'm doing a smaller version, i just like the look of the front of the house but i just can't seem to find any good place to put the stairs, i'm just no good at doing it, i've built tones of houses but the hallways and the stairs area, think i need a little help so i can learn to built better ones, i learn visually and by building so if i could get some people to draw on the photo some layouts i could pratice a bunch out which wil help me practise for other houses too. I just suck big time at it, it's probably the hardest part of the house to build.

Edit: here is a more zoomed in photo Zoomed in layout

You may want to download "RiversideNoSims" version for it has a few square houses that you can get some idea's from. http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=503756

@Pygsmyemm you do know that you are allowed to upload jpeg here at MTS. Just hit the go advance button at the bottom.

The house shown is actually quite narrow and long. 9 tiles wide at the front so that is where I would start. Your house is way larger then the plan. You can make it wider but have to keep in mind the proportions.

If I was keeping to the dimensions shown I would have drawn a five tile wall on the right and a four tile wall on the left. Each window given the type it is takes up 2 squares. Then when you move to the rooms you would see the bedroom is 4 tiles wide which is wide enough for a child's bedroom. beyond that you can see the bathroom is 3 tub, basin and toilet. Then you have to decide if a one tile hall there is okay or if you want it to be two tiles. As soon as you enlarge it you also widen the house, so you always need to take that into consideration. To make it a two tile wide hallway I would widen the bedroom on the left to 5 tiles with either one tile between the large window or use 3 smaller windows across to balance it. There are no stairs used, it's only 1 story.

I'm fine with building the rooms, i've gotten really good at that plus making furniture placement look really nice, i built an almost exact replica of Sookie's house from True Blood a while ago Here but i copied it all from any photos i could find but when it comes to building different shaped houses i get stuck on where to put the stairs and a hallway and they end up looking so bad, usualy you would near the door of such houses, i tend to go for the country look to be honest i don;t know why and it looks great in the Pleasantview in 1 part of the town because it's a very quaint type of Neighborhood, it reminds me of parts of America like Idaho because of all the forest, i imagine camping sites and stuff in that neighbourhood. I'm not planning to make a replica of the house i've based the outside of the house of though, i generally never do that, i pick a house for the front of it then i build the inside on my own, i think it takes the fun out of it for me copying from photos all the time, it makes it too easy, , id say i've definitely become more of a builder like you guys.

The Family i'm building this house for is the Burb family, i did have a house for them but i've changed the Pleasantview around since so time for a re-build, don't know what i was thinking building the house house i put them in though, i tried the whole split-level sitting room look but coming back to it, it just wasn't good, i've added a Retro Diner with a pool, an all-in-one shopping place that's modern with a Café/restaurant, i put the Burbs in Pleasantview because i felt they belonged in that Neighbourhood, they were looking for a nice place to settle to raise their daughter and Pleasantview has really interesting sims so they fit right in. I never build huge houses though, i don't think it's nessicary, i just build houses with enough space for what i put into it for both middle and higher class, i used to build bigger houses but i hated waiting on them getting from 1 room to the next and it took them longer to get out almost missing the school bus or their ride to work, i do like open plan because it makes it miles easier and quicker for the sims to move around, i've built a couple houses with open plan. Alas though i get really stuck on stairways and hallways, i'm planning to give this house i'm building for the Burbs 2 floors, i make all my houses 2 floors.

I'm confused because your picture shows an empty shell rather than a house layout. It's also a completely different shape to the floorplan you posted.

When I make floorplans into TS2 houses, I normally look at the rooms on the floorplan and count how many blocks I think each room represents. The following numbers can help when converting:

Minimum sizes:

Master bedroom 4x4
Bathroom 2x2
Single bedrooms 2x3 (preferably bigger)
Kitchen area 2x3

Then if you can see items of furniture within the floorplan, that helps too.

I use house plans a lot when building sims houses because I also struggle with layout, but I do sometimes change them or go from scratch. The trick with staircases is to think about the paths sims will tend to take to things. They normally get up, use the bathroom and need to leave for work so you need a clear path from bedroom, to bathroom, to front door. If the kitchen is accessible on the way, even better for your early risers or late starters.

With the plan you shared - I can see that it's 10 squares across. That's 3 for the utility room (with its 3 counter blocks) and the kitchen is a little off but let's call that 3 as well. Two for the entry because two is a nice size for a hallway and the door takes up half the space on the plan. Across to the closet because that's easier to measure, the closet is 3 across, but it overlaps one with the hallway, so +2 and we're up to 7. The bathroom has a counter, space, and bathtub so that is three, making 10 altogether.

Top to bottom (front to back) sizing is two each for the storage and utility, (I can see these from the shape of them as I know they are 3 the other way across). Another 4 counting down the kitchen counters to the jutting-out wall after the refridgerator. The dining room looks about the same size, so 4 again. Then it gets harder to judge so we'll cross reference to the left hand side. The porch is three tiles because you have the two from the storage and one from the Utility. Then that bedroom looks about 4x5 when compared to the kitchen and dining rooms, and the bathroom is 3 based on positioning of the bath, toilet, and counter (we'll ignore the laundry hamper).

The simified plan is by now slightly skewed from the real floorplan. In the sims version, the closet and bathroom are both 3x3 which isn't the case on the plan, but it still works. Oh, and I've just realised that I've made the bedroom 5x5 rather than 4x5, but it's OK. We can just stretch the left side of the plan out a bit with no issues. Looking at the size of the next two bedrooms and the bathroom between them, I'm going to make them 4x4 each, with a one-tile hallway (not ideal but OK, and I can always omit the wall between that and the great room if it causes issues) and that bathroom is clearly a 2x3. So it was 8 tiles from the porch to the end of the master bedroom, 3 for the ensuite, 4 for the bedroom, 3 for the bathroom, 1 for closet, 4 for final bedroom - total 22 in length.

22x10 is physically too big for a 2x2 lot. You could squeeze it onto a 2x3, put a driveway on the left hand side if you wanted to, and lead a path from the porch to a garden at the side, but more comfortable for this house would be a 3x3, perhaps even a or 3x4 if you want to add a driveway at the front as shown, and add sideways space from its neighbours, respectively. - Edit - I messed this up, ignore this. It looked too cramped even on a 2x3 so I ended up using a 3x3 and it looks much better. A 3x4 would be better still but I had nowhere to place a lot like that for building.

Lemme get my coffee, and I'll build this into a quick and dirty house for you, and show the workings out as I go.

I was going to offer to build it, but her layout and reading of the plan isn't the problem as she showed later. The original house is not that plan but more slightly inspired by it. I still say she needs to place the rooms then it's easiest to see where the stairs and what type should go in there.

If you always have trouble with stairs, but otherwise like your house layouts try this: Stair Halls.

Build the bottom and top floors the way you like them. For this concept to work best, building the hall onto which all the bedrooms and the main bathroom open along one exterior wall rather than in the middle is called for. Then decide what kind of stairs you want. If you use object stairs, you should have two of them in order to prevent routing problems - two sims can't climb object stairs at the same time, and they need three floorless spaces in a line above them in order to be placed. Modular stairs can be climbed by two sims at once, and need four spaces in a line above them. Spiral stairs need three squares in an L shape above them and I for one always have to place them several times, trying several facings, in order to make sure both the top and bottom are accessible. You can also find building tutorials that will allow you to use building cheats to build stairs with landings and switchback stairs, using the modular stairs, but you should probably save those for when you're a little more confident.

Now, pick a wall on the outside of the house. If you're building with a foundation, place one that is big enough to accommodate your chosen stairs. Enclose it, build a second floor to match. Place the stairs. If you have Mansion & Gardens and want the stairs to be adjacent to a wall, remember to turn move_objects on long enough to place them; but do not, in the process, allow the squares at the foot and head of the stairs to overlap with the squares onto which any doors or arches open. Make sure that there's enough room for two sims to pass each other and turn around at the head and foot of the stairs, and that the stair hall allows access to a convenient number of rooms without passing through private spaces. Place doors or remove walls as appropriate to connect the stair hall to the rest of the house. Place a roof. Decorate. Don't forget lights and windows!

The stair hall has the advantage of varying the shape of the house so it's not quite so boxy - it will usually be shorter than the side it's tacked onto, and probably at most three squares wide. Another advantage is that it won't eat up a bunch of space in the middle of the house and complicate routing from one room to the next. The disadvantage is that everyone will have to troop over to that side of the house to go up and down stairs.

If you really like having the stairs in the middle of the house, consider having two sets of stairs - one that will primarily be used by company, and one that will primarily be used by family. The public stairs will lead from the entryway or living area - the areas most likely to be entered by company - to a hall that has access to places they may want to go, such as a bathroom or recreation room. The private stairs will lead from the kitchen or utility room to a hall that directly accesses the bedrooms, so the family can go straight from their rooms to the places where they do household chores.

Yeah, I guess I realised that already, but oh well. I got a nice house out of it I also think it's a useful exercise, if you're using a house plan as inspiration, to start as close to the house plan as you can and go from there. Though I must admit, I don't normally adapt houseplans so much as I just simify them - there are so many house plans online that it's pretty easy to find one with the desired number of floors, bedrooms, etc, in my experience.

So here is the house. If you wanted to make it shorter, you could definitely cut out the dining room, one of the smaller bedrooms, and the second bathroom. Move the door of the en-suite so that it opens into a little corridor between the large and small bedrooms instead.

These are the changes I made:


Then this is how I'd adapt this house plan if I wanted to shorten it and/or add stairs.

simsfreq- LOL this is why i always love country styles like every time the houses are always nice, i've got quite a few houses in this style one of them just a small house with stairs on the side of the house wth 1 bedroom big enough for 2 kids, 1 bathroom and a tinkering room, i could try putting the stairs in the kitchen like you've done i think that will work a lot better even if in a boxy house, i'm really not wanting to make the layout exact just the front of the house, i gave it yellow sliding walls like cape cod house gazania showed before he deleted his post, it looks cute ^_^,

Peni Griffin - i'll try the 2 sets of stairs in the middle too, i always love how US houses have the stairs in the living room or in the hallway on it's side or down the way like Sookie's house, i wish we could make 2 level stairs like they have but it wouldn't look right in TS2 but it would solve a lot of problems, you probs can in TS4 though because you have the lower foundation tool, if only they put that in TS2, they totally could of.

Oh, you totally can make the two-level stairs with the landings in Sims 2! It just involves using tricks. You've got the stage foundation tool to use, and modular stairs, and building cheats and stuff.

Two-level stairs?

You can do those quite well, either using cheats or the stage. They might not be exactly what you want, but they can look pretty good. (Partially ninja'd by Peni Griffin. Oops.)

There are also pre-made stairs you can just plop in the game. The animations will NOT be perfect (you might want to consider that if you are strict about animations), sometimes Sims appear to be walking through parts of the stairs, and you still need to consider the space around them. But I have the last one here, and it works pretty well when I'm in a lazy mood. (Just because I really like building lots doesn't mean I don't get lazy once in a while. )I have not tried the other two. I would package and bin your house and try a Sim in your house in a test hood to see if you're OK with the animation glitches

http://www.drealm.info/simlogical/s...irs_Winders.htm
http://www.drealm.info/simlogical/s..._Fakefloors.htm (This one will take a bit of fudging with cheats.)
http://www.drealm.info/simlogical/s...HalfLanding.htm

With the split-level foundation it just takes up more space esepcially if i wanna do the one with the landing on it, i've just played around with my house using your suggestions, you've been a great help definitely better off with 1 staircase in the kitchen or 2 near the door but i've opened it up with the sitting room instead with 2 staircases although i could make it the kitchen too but i like it as the sitting room, i kind of went with the Cape Cod house idea as well, that looks better than other houses i've done apart from Sookie's house that's the best house i've ever made, i don't half have a hard time with where to put the stairs lol, i could turn the office into a back porch too, i could take off a row from the back of the house to make a smaller toilet and a porch but i think i'll keep it as a fully boxed house. What would be the cheats i use if i wanted to make some two-level stairs? i imagine one would be the elivated floor cheat, i've been playing around with that a bit but haven't liked what i've done so far.

Split levels are not easy but can be done. Myself I dislike how you go up and then you go up when playing and how the walls look. There are tutorials on them around and yes you need CFE to make those. I built one house with them just to say I did one. I did not find messing with it enjoyable. Your millage may differ.

You can also do simple landing stairs using the OFB stage and the modular stairs. So stairs up to stage, from stage up to above level. Very easy, can look effective. No cheats needed although sometimes move objects might be if you are making it against a wall.

Google some sims 2 stair tutorials, I believe MikeInside's tutorials are still online and they are fantastic.

Another tutorial:

http://vimpse.tumblr.com/splitlevel

I sometimes do a simple variation of this with the stairs, but in the middle of a more-open floor plan, NOT against the walls. Like others here, I just don't like how the walls look near the staircase. I tried the traditional method a few times and either messed up, or actually succeeded, but got the warpy stuff you really can't fully alter should you decide to renovate the house, and that limits your wall choices to mostly-solid colors. (Once in a long while, certain patterns look interesting with the warpy look, but very, very rarely.)

I'm still trying to see if there was a tutorial for what I do. I doubt I'm that skilled to think about this method on my own!

I think for a boxy house it's best to just centralize the stairs to the door, i looked up country houses and they all do that with them because it just looks better, only other place you can put them is in the kitchen but it's still centralized, i was going to put another wall on the right side of the stairs but i felt the hallway was too small, i think if it were a wider house in a rectangula shape i could get away with putting the stairs some where els but i'm builing this one next to 2 other boxy ones, country mansions, manors and colonial houses in a wide rectangular shape tend to have a rectangular hallway but again it's in the middle of the house or they have a big foyer with stairs ether side or in the middle but it's still at the center of the house so the stair placement is correct for the type of house i've built, i'll see how it looks with the split-level stairs, i can do the basic ones with the split-level foundation and probs one with some stairs in the middle.

For boxy houses, you might want to look at Foursquare house plans for ideas and inspiration. These were houses built in America from the late 1800s until about the 1930s or so, often from kits that you could order from a catalog for a couple thousand dollars. Here's an example: http://www.rdlgdesigns.com/wp-conte...s-castleton.jpg I actually have a bunch of old Sears catalogs from the 1910s that I bought at an estate sale that have house kits in them (but there are also lots of scans of such online), and I've built some of them in-game because they work really well for Sims purposes, as they are simple (but attractive at least IMO) designs, usually four rooms downstairs and four up and square in shape (hence the name "foursquare") often with a central staircase (or sometimes one to the side, in an alcove sort of thing) and no small, fiddly hallways for Sims to traffic jam in.

Also, for U-shaped, half-landing stairs when you don't have enough straight space for a standard stair or an L-shape using the stage foundation and you don't want to use CFE (and thus end up with warped walls and houses/spaces that are really hard to "renovate"), Inge's stand-alone half-landing stairs (as well as her winding stairs) are really useful. Both are on this page: http://www.drealm.info/simlogical/s...ims2_Stairs.htm and there are lots of recolors around for both of them. Neither have animations and just "teleport" Sims between floors, but this is actually good because they don't create the traffic jams that animated non-modular staircases cause.

Perfect! and it definitely makes the inside rooms look more interesting, it looks like the Goth's house is a four square too apart from the front of the house with the foyer because it's a small manor, Pleasamtview is perfect for these kind of houses, i may actually move these houses to the street the Goth family is on instead of on the left side of the town where the huge house was, i deleted that because no family would ever live in there i never like houses built by EA, i think i might move my church there instead, i think i will make my house like these designs except improve the look of the front of the house. I agree these houses are most efficient for sims to live in or open plan. Thanks a lot iCad! .

You're welcome. I think Pleasantview would be great for this style, as its simplicity fits in well with Maxis's architectural "style." (Or lack thereof, as the case may be. ) Also, the style IRL was designed for small urban lots, which were generally narrow, so the general design style gives you maximum square footage in a small space. When I build them for the game, I put them on a 2x2 lot (which is great for more urban/developed settings), and there's still space for a nice yard in the front or back, depending on where you place the house. You can definitely dress up the front with fencing and landscaping and such and the exteriors with different kinds of cladding (Mixing siding and stone, for instance) and make them very pretty. You can also screen in the front porches that are characteristic of the style using these screen walls: http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=243958 for a nice effect. Lots of things you can do to "dress them up," if you want. And yes, they're very playable, for Sims purposes.

I like these shutter ones for all parts of the house including back conservatory type porches, can be used for both modern and old houses http://www.modthesims.info/d/524566

Those are nice, too. I just like the screen look. Reminds me of the screen porch on my grandparents' lake cabin when I was growing up. It's more rustic, I guess, and I'm fond of rustic at times. The only bad thing about the screen walls is that they're actually greenhouse walls, so they don't "fall" when you look at them in cutaway view, which is what I mostly play in. In that sense, windows have a bit of an advantage.

I think i'll keep the front with the vector white fence, i love the tranditional look of a front porch and a wooden bench or swing seat looking out with maybe a chess table, maybe a wrap around porch, that makes a house look bigger than it is.