T w e n t y S i d e d
Week three! Finally, we can get the interior shape done and get started on moving forward in the years.
Last week I actually made a mistake Gasp. I know, right? I thought I was the first infallible 24-year-old too. We will have to press on.. I mentioned that my ‘outlet cover’ in the kitchen (pictured below) was deserving of praise from future inhabitants.
Later, the inhabitants will cry because there is only one outlet by the kitchen counters. They should be instead rejoicing that the old homeowners needed a place to plug in the home phone.
My bad. This mistake, funnily enough, came from a childhood memory misfire. I know that home phones didn’t plug into the wall! I might be a zoomer, but I am only a year too young to be a millennial by most accounts. Plus, my dad collected junk electronics and refused to move into the 20th century.
This isn’t a case of ‘haha child only see phone wireless’, this is a case of simple misremembering. Why were my parents rejoicing that the prior inhabitants needed a place to plug in the phone? To plug in the router. Not an electrical outlet, a phone line, dur. Our router needed to be in dads office and we didn’t have wireless. So we used the kitchen phone jack to cobble together a solution using CAT 3 extensions.
Maybe later, if our future home dwellers are similarly demented, I’ll try and find an object that looks enough like a router and modem to stick on that countertop, that’s something I’ve never attempted before.
I suppose I should mention some of the perspectives I’m working from for this build. Because it’s what I know, this house is going to be set pretty well in the New England region of the US. What does that mean for it? Cold winters, clay underground, fireplace, attic, and possibly a basement. The plants will be lush, but difficult to control, and water damage is inevitable.
The biggest decision will be who will actually buy and furnish the house at the end of the project. We have three major contenders there. We could have a landlord buy it and split it down the middle to make a duplex, making the future inhabitants actually two different households. We could have the place get deeply damaged over the years, forcing the price down and giving it to a lower-income family sometime in the 90s. Or, we could have some blogger-influencer-flipper type get ahold of it and either ruin a lovely piece of history or try to preserve it while still bringing up the market value. Lots of options, for now, though, we need to finish the interior.
I’ve already thrown in light fixtures and outlet covers like I did with the downstairs. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a study. By today’s standards and where we are fictitiously building this place, the study could legally be called a third bedroom, and likely will be in future listings to drive up the price. They wouldn’t be able to do it without any loopholes, though. It could only be called a bedroom if it has a window, a single-entry door, and a closet. Obviously, the study doesn’t have a closet(Well, neither do the actual bedrooms, yet, I haven’t gotten that far.). ‘Closet’ can technically be translated to ‘place that holds clothes’ in the law of where I grew up.
When my parents lost our house, we had to go to see dozens of apartments to find somewhere pet-free and on our strapped budget. You wouldn’t believe the number of dining rooms/walk-in closets/studies that got listed as ‘bedrooms’ because the landlord threw a giant old dresser in the space and called it a day.
The house we’re building here is gigantic, so I hardly think anyone is being ‘scammed’ by calling the study a bedroom, but it happens.
Up in the weird little attic, we’ve actually got two spaces. To the left is an unfinished space intended to be used for storage. It’s a weird and oblong room, which will make putting things away a pain, but that seems plenty realistic. To the right, we actually have a half-finished area. During building, an extra room like that would be the lowest budget priority, so it did get finished floors, but not insulated walls. Unfortunately, The Sims doesn’t allow me to put a ‘pull down’ ladder that should actually be there, so I guess that staircase is very drafty. I suspect that due to this, the attic space will not remain unfinished for long.
Off even further to the right, we have the balcony. If I’m truly honest, I just thought it looked nice, but given the time and era, let’s say that the husband of our building couple really wanted roof access to put up Christmas lights in the winter, it’s a vain little project but so is the rest of the house, really.
Footnotes:
[1] Gasp. I know, right? I thought I was the first infallible 24-year-old too. We will have to press on.
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This is very interesting. I never considered the legalities of this subject. Whenever we moved houses we’d have the obvious, non-interchangeable rooms (bathroom, kitchen) and then every room where we put a bed was considered a bedroom. As a matter of fact a room that used to be just a small study was transformed into my bedroom at some point just by virtue of putting a bed in it and I indeed just put my clothes inside some furniture that was not supposed to be a closet. I do not know how that would hold up legally here.
Yeah. Bedroom laws are weird. In my first New York City apartment, the building had what would be a decent-but-hardly-extravagant bedroom, which the landlord cut in half with a partition wall. He then literally took a corner of each space and built wierd triangular “closets” that were a complete waste of space. The odd size meant you couldn’t really hang clothed or store much of anything. But they were Closets, and so my 600 square foot fifth-floor-walk up palace could technically be rented as a two bedroom. Good times!
I remember when my roommate and I were looking for an apartment in Berkeley we were shown a “2 bedroom”. One bedroom was a windowless walk-in closet with a bed, and the other one had a window facing the side of a half constructed building a few feet away. So we were like “Nope!”
I don’t usually point out typos unless people are requesting feedback, but I noticed you spelled “inhabitants” as “inhabitance” thrice in this post but had it correct in the quote from the previous post, so I figured you know how to spell it and thus might like to have the typo pointed it out. (If that’s not the case, just tell me shut up. :)
How hard is this house going to be to heat in the winter? I’m looking at those big glass windows (not double-glazed in that time period, I’m sure) and can practically see heat drain from the interior like water from a sieve. Or are the walls really well insulated to make up for it? I haven’t lived in the New England region so I don’t know if houses there are built with proper insulation. (I’m still traumatized by four years of living in Melbourne housing where I couldn’t make up my mind if the builders simply hadn’t heard of the concept of insulation or were actively shunning its use.)
I’m pretty back and forth on typo correction, but three of the same error in one post? Yeah, I want to know about that. Geez.
As for the heating, I am positive it will come up later in this house’s renovations, because yes, those walls are insulated about as well as a lean-to. For a time without central heating, old houses really loved their big heat sink windows for some reason. Historically it feels like it should be the other way around. ‘Ah, yes, this place was built in the 1900s, so the windows are tiny to keep warm in the winter.’. That would make total sense to me, but sure, weird vain 1900 century people, shuttle around your one fireplace for warmth in this totally preventable frozen tundra of a house.
Fashion can cover a multitude of sins. I live in Ontario, and we have far too much housing that takes after southern California. “Snow? What’s that?”
Cool, “three strikes (of the same thing)” sounds like a decent rule of thumb to make it worth bringing up then. :)
I sometimes wonder if older generations were just, like, more used to wearing tons of clothing to keep warm at all times, even around the house? Might help explain why older homes are so terrible at keeping warm. As someone most likely on the autism spectrum I disfavor wearing clothing that goes below the elbows/knees if I don’t have to (once I moved to the tropics I realized I could never live anywhere outside them ever again), but maybe neurotypical people don’t mind so much?
Yeah, old-style housing expects you to wear winter clothing indoors. Mostly because they didn’t have the ability to actually seal+insulate things up to modern standards.
I live in upstate New York in a 1889 Victorian home that needed a lot of work when we bought it so I have some insight into heating. Most of the windows were designed to have separate storm windows which actually does a great job of cutting down airflow. Sure there wasn’t insulation but there was cheap fuel. Fill a room in the basement with coal 3-4 times a year and you could be toasty.
Thanks for sharing, I love reading about your design process!
Gah, and no word on the second balcony yet. What is that for?
Don’t feel dumb for the phone thing. I didn’t even notice and we had one of those rotary phones in my childhood.
Though I’m also pretty sure our phones are weird. They did have a phone outlet, but unlike how I understand American phones the phone cable was connected into a special weird four-pronged adapter that in turn was connected to a special electrical outlet that was just for phones and shaped unlike any of the half-a-dozen kinds of electric outlet models we had up until the late aughts, when it was finally all standardized into a simple three-pronged outlet of neutral, current and grounding (yes, Brazil got into the twentieth-first century without grounding as a standard for our outlets).
I have no idea why phones needed their very own outlet.
It looked like this:
https://http2.mlstatic.com/D_NQ_NP_611419-MLB42678080826_072020-V.jpg
The second balcony is an ill-advised bit of roof without real access. It will hold snow, and debris, and is only explainable by idiotic first-time homeowners with disposable income wanting something ‘pretty’ but not functional.
The US is still working on standardizing three-prong outlets, actually! We have two-prong, which doesn’t have the grounding, and three-prong, which does. We get around this by making rules for manufacturers about what can go into a two-pronged outlet and what can’t. Hairdryer? Low enough voltage to be two-prong. Vacuum cleaner? Usually not. It means US homes are usually filled with an unsafe number of adapters and extension cords to let anything plug into anything else, yay.
It’s helpful to separate plugs from outlets.
In the US, code now requires 3-prong (grounded) outlets for every application. Any existing 2-prong needs to be replaced the next time it’s worked on, and not legal to install them anymore. Kind of like how technically there are still houses with fuse boxes, but circuit breakers are the standard. Everyo outlet needs to provide a ground for appliances that require it.
We’re already on the second wave of making outlets safer by requiring GFCI (ground fault current interrupt – the ones with the reset button) in wet areas (esp kitchens and baths)
Plugs are a different story. Plugs are still perfectly allowed to be ungrounded (2-prong). The difference is not about power (you mean wattage, not voltage, btw), but rather about construction.
The short version is that a 3-prong plug is required if the appliance has a shock hazard if ungrounded.
Your example is acrually somewhat illustrative. A hair dryer draws crazy power – often over 1000 watts, and very comparable to most vacuum cleaners.
But a hair dryer is compact, with a plastic case and little exposed metal. If there’s a short in a hair dryer, it would be difficult to shock the user. Any exposed metal is required to be “double Insulated” – even if a wire gets free it can’t energize anything. A plastic vacuum cleaner is less compact but still has little shock risk (which is why many vacuum are also 2-prong. On the other hand, my coffee maker has a lot more metal, and despite drawing less power is more of a shock risk.
It’s not as simple as metal/non-metal body (though that’s a useful first proxy). It’s more a determination if the construction allows a failure case that could present a shock risk. If so, ground that puppy.
The goal is to ensure you don’t come into contact with a live wire and get a shock. There are many ways to accomplish that. Grounding the appliance is one method. It’s not always required.
I thought there would be an outside ladder to reach it, but I have no idea if The Sims 4 added such features.
But even if it was accessible I was struggling with what was its purpose.
New homeowner hubris is a good reason.
It could probably be converted into a graveyard for baseballs and other thrown objects in the future, though. Or a secret altar to pagan gods.
I’m not saying to take inspirations from McMansion Hell but…
Also, to be perfectly fair we should consider how canon various supernatural stuff like flying or teleportation might be in the Sims universe… which would be in line with a secret altar I guess…
The plan I bought for my irl home has it advertised as having 4 brs
But per county permitting, it has 5 brs
Because any room seperated by a door and with a closet is a br
Huh? They absolutely plugged into the wall. I have no idea what you’re trying to say here. Where else would phone jacks be placed? Now, the phone jacks probably wouldn’t been placed that close to the kitchen workspace and would probably have been placed just inside the kitchen entryway like this or that .
What I meant here was they didn’t have an OUTLET of a typical sort, they had a landline, my bad.
Really enjoying the updates, Bay. I’ll admit I wasn’t following the site for a few months there, but your consistent updating and me getting a chance to catch up on your entries this week has definitely brought me back. Love to see the blog continuing. :)
Oh! Right, because they… were powered through the phone line itself, weren’t they?
Yeah, had to look that one up.Now that you bring it up, I do remember that a landline phone would still work during a power outage.Yeah, I’ve noticed the “bedroom” thing, too. Suddenly any separate room is a “bedroom”, even if it’s 6 feet wide. ?
Not if they want to call them bedrooms in the listing, at any rate!
Supposedly, there are certain characteristics a bedroom is supposed to contain if they want to be qualified as a bedroom (here in Texas, anyway), namely a closet and at least one window to the outside. I was looking at one (piece of crap) house with our realtor once and he got salty because the listing said it was 3-bedrooms but one of them technically wouldn’t have qualified.
enjoying the updates a lot
The Sims never runned perfectly on my toaster so I never engaged a lot with the options for building, maybe a room expansion here and there, changing the paint in a room, moving furniture, but it was prefab for me.
And I remember some really drab apartments.
As a GM/roleplayer I really enjoyed making characters and giving them traits to make them archetypical, like if they belonged to a sitcom or something. And the Life Goal mechanic… great stuff, older Sims in comparison were just testing out what people liked from this games.
Here in Berlin (Germany) apartments are rented without closets, light fixtures, or sometimes even a kitchen!
Yes, as a tenant, you have to build your own storage spaces and install your own electric lights in an apartment you don’t even own. It’s absolute madness!