T w e n t y S i d e d
Our family has two months left to entirely finish the house in time for the baby to arrive. The bathroom is next, then the kitchen, then the laundry room if they have time. The bathroom is not bad, and Lorretta is tempted to keep the vintage façade…except for the moldy grout. The Sims has no good way to show it, but that pink tile was put in nearly a century ago, without ventilation, with only one bathroom to the entire house. That grout is black.
They try to save the tile by removing it carefully, but by the time the fifth one disintegrates in their hands, it’s clear that won’t be happening; this is a reno.
Let’s get one last look at the bathroom in its former glory. Lorretta and Michael aren’t seeing this, they’re seeing a water damaged mold castle, but we can still appreciate the old build one last time.
Lorretta salvages the old claw-foot tub, only having to replace the fixtures and give it a good clean. She is trying to find some tile she doesn’t hate at the hardware store, when she laments to Michael that she hates all the sensible options. Michael asks why they aren’t going with something less sensible, then, since she hates them so much.
They go back and forth for quite some time about it, Lorretta trying to point out resale value, and Michael trying to get out of her what she actually wants. He is young and idealistic, she knows better, but, still…she has been decorating her new house with a future buyer in mind. Michael delivers the final argument to the conversation when he pulls the baby card. If she’s decorating for a future buyer, she’s not thinking of the place as her own, to have and live with her daughter and future grandchild. She tries to argue after that, but no, he’s won and she knows it. She picks out some tile samples she actually likes and she and Michael spend the afternoon on Craigslist trying to find some pieces to accent the claw-foot tub without spending a fortune.
Many Walmart-parking-lot meetings and DIY projects later, they have a space that Lorretta actually likes. She doesn’t know it, but she’s keeping up a tradition, of sorts, started by her grandmother. That bathroom had been the one space in the house that Mrs. Smith had any real control over when the house was originally built. By deciding to do as she damn well pleased, Lorretta has kept the spirit of the space the same.
The style might age well, it might not, but unlike Jimbo she didn’t decorate the space just to suit a fad, and so the value will be higher either way. Not the sell value, mind you, but the one of cost-to-reward ratio. Lorretta loves the space, and so it gives more reward inherently in the form of that enjoyment of it.
Up next, the kitchen, and Lorretta is dedicated to actually making it something she likes, or at the very least doesn’t hate.
She is finding quickly that she has a love for vintage and the color black, but every design she mocks up for the kitchen using those things makes it look badly dated in a way even she hates. So, instead, she tries to picture a space she’d like to have holiday meals cooked in, one where a highchair might go, and imagine if there’s space to cook together. She decides, in her pursuit of that, to rip out the kitchen island. Kitchen islands are trendy, and bring property value up, but she’d much rather put a kitchen table in the middle of the room for kid-driven science experiments and the occasional cookie baking.
She’s opting for pastels to complement her vintage vibe instead of black, her second favorite mix. She gets almost everything for the room second-hand, except for the high-chair, which Kelly has been given at her baby shower. She wanted to keep the hardwood in the room, but underneath the kitchen island it’s been badly damaged. And, if she’s honest with herself, cheerios fit between the old slats and that sounds like a nightmare. She switches out for a more functional linoleum she hopes will be easy to clean.
Sidebar: What sociopaths leave their chairs out that far from a table when no one is sitting in them?! You physically cannot push them closer without a modpack that allows you to push things on the X-Y-Z axis with cheat codes! Which is an unbelievable sentence to need to say! If my family left their chairs out like that every time we got up from a table I’d throw out the chairs! And the family! Gah!
Best. Plot Twist. Ever.
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Pulled out chairs serve a very important purpose: cats can sit on them. They can also sit on pulled in chairs but it’s less convenient and you can’t see the cat as well.
Of course, a cat on a chair can try to take food from the table, but a cat not in a chair could also just jump on the table and do that anyway.
Also, children too small to pull out the chairs can clamber in without needing an adult to pull it out first. That might just be an “us” thing though–we always have a rug under our tables that make it harder to drag chairs around.
Although… are the two chairs not pulled out the same? Something about that picture makes it look like the right chair is pushed in but the left is pulled out.
The chairs are different colors. They’re the same distance, but the right one is darker, which your brain is thinking is in shadow, with the table being the only object around to cast a shadow on it, meaning the chair must be under it – but it’s not. It’s just darker than the lighter one, which is NOT pulled out and in the light.
The sink is gone from the kitchen. I wonder where they’re gonna do the dishes now.
Gah! Thank you, I entirely forgot to put the sink back. It’s fixed now.
It’s easy for me, the player to forget, not so easy for people actually living in a space to forget. So, no, they have a sink, I’m just a parsnip and forgot it.
Can I just say that “parsnip” as a self deprecating insult is amazing and I need to start using it.
Also, in Russian and Romanian it’s “pasternak,” which turns it into a cool in-joke nickname!
If you have a garden hose, sinks are redundant.
You just need a expandable tub and drainage hose, and you can bathe in whatever room you like with the power of siphons.
It’s weird how *satisfying* architecture-based storytelling is.
Oh, man, the first “nice” table and chairs I bought were oak from a supposedly “nice” furniture maker. The chairs they sold with it had arms. But the table was designed such that the chairs couldn’t physically push under the table – there was about 3/4” too little clearance. After some back and forth with the table company and many photos with measuring tapes, they agreed they mis-built the table. They offered a new one or a 50% refund. I was young and poor so I took the refund, and cut some oak dowel spacers that I screwed onto the legs to make it fit. Worked OK!
The mismatched chairs in the kitchen looks exactly like every dinner table my family and myself ever had.
So that’s very on point.
But yeah, I remember hating back to the Sims 1 and 2 how the game steadfastly refuses to let you tidy up the space by pushing chairs into the table or any space that chairs have been EXPLICITLY designed over the ages to fit into and save space. And inefficient use of space drives me mad.
Huh… I’m pretty sure that at least in Sims 2, the chairs do go under the table? Maybe not pushed in all the way, but I distinctly remember the experience of pausing, going into build mode and putting chairs next to a table, then unpausing and seeing the chairs scoot themselves under the table, as though a family of ghosts had sat down and were scooting in, in unison.
Granted that I have a ton of mods, but I don’t think any of them are for that specifically.If so then maybe I’m misremembering things from The Sims 1.
Memories from over 2 decades ago are unreliable :/
Oh man, the “resale value” argument gets me so much. Because on the one hand, yeah, that’s true! Tastes vary, so the “safest” thing is just to avoid something that will specifically clash with the tastes of a prospective buyer. Bland, inoffensive to the largest number of people, a blank slate. So they’re thinking, “gosh, look at the potential!”, or at least, “nothing wrong with it”, instead of, “well, we’d have to remodel that to live with it”. This is an enormously expensive thing, and if you mess it up you’ll lose tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s financially irresponsible not to consider some future buyer, however hypothetical.
And yet… and yet! What is it for? Should everyone think that way; should the next owners keep it a “blank slate” as well, so they don’t ruin their investment? And the next? Will it ever be a place anyone really enjoys living, at any point?
He’s absolutely right, I think: she wants to keep the house, and live in it, so doing it according to what she actually likes is the right move. She may not ever sell it–or it may be sold fifty years down the line, when everything needs to be updated anyway.
So it doesn’t matter if it’s appealing to buyers, hopefully, because she’s not intending for there to be any.
And the new bathroom is stylish, anyway.
Clearly this is a good argument for a *modular* house, where you can pop out and rearrange internal walls and styles in the frame.
Even better, what if the entire thing was powered by machines so you could activate them and rules unfold.
Would make a great level either way…
I wonder if some poor coder try to create collision detection with all the different styles of table and chair before giving up and putting them in seperate bounding boxes.
Oh, no, I missed this one last week because it didn’t show up in the “Epilogue” section. Bummer.
Choking on laughter over that last paragraph in particular!