{"id":55009,"date":"2022-12-02T06:00:11","date_gmt":"2022-12-02T11:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=55009"},"modified":"2023-10-05T12:34:11","modified_gmt":"2023-10-05T16:34:11","slug":"sims-4-overthinking-wooden-outlet-covers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=55009","title":{"rendered":"Sims 4 Overthinking: Wooden Outlet Covers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alright, where we left off two weeks ago,<\/a> we had just ‘finished’ the house’s facade.<\/p>\n

This is not the final finished exterior by a longshot, it can't be. With so many windows, there is nowhere for me to place stairs except for in the middle of the building, which I try to avoid.<\/div>
This is not the final finished exterior by a longshot, it can't be. With so many windows, there is nowhere for me to place stairs except for in the middle of the building, which I try to avoid.<\/div><\/p>\n

I’ve worked from a few reference images of real-life houses built in the early 1900s, but I’m mostly winging it. Half of the point of this project is to be low-maintenance while I get my bearings, so I suppose I should admit I don’t do a lot of historical research for these projects. It feels a bit dishonest to say ‘let’s go through one of my normal builds’ and then do a ton of research I never do on my own without an audience. Maybe I’ll do some research and disclose it, but if I’m honest, probably not. What I know comes from family, stories, and history I already have.
\n<\/p>\n

It’s a bit of a mixed bag, and a bit of a cop-out, to avoid research altogether. I know if I try to do things exactly right, and defend myself, I suddenly open myself up to criticism about what I’m doing and how ‘right’ it is. It’s a bit of a toxic system, the more work I do, the less rewarding it is. If I say ‘brick was really popular in 1923, so we’re going to use that’ I might get someone pointing out that the shingles I chose weren’t invented until 1940, making my efforts pointless at best, and downright self-destructive at worst.<\/p>\n

But either way, time to press forward to the interior.<\/p>\n

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Wow, I hate it. The room in the back is supposed to be the kitchen. The house I grew up in had a door to the backyard right off the kitchen, and I end up trying to do that in many of my builds. Not sure if it’s nostalgia or habit. The first time I ever played The Sims was in that house, and it could have easily just become ‘how it was done’ in my mind. Either way, what is going on with the living room? Dining room? Living room? Entryway? No, this is garbage. I have intentionally backed myself into a corner with the fireplace. I put a chimney on the roof, so the fireplace must go below it, and, as it doesn’t fit upstairs, the fireplace has to sit exactly there. This leads to a problem since there is now a strange, extra room between the front door (bottom left) and the living room (room with fireplace).<\/p>\n

It could be a dining room, but it seems odd to me to go in the front door right to the dining room. In general, this layout is a pain, let’s try to redo it.<\/p>\n

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Okay, much better. Now we have a weird little entryway for coats and boots, and the place is much more built for entertaining. I haven’t made the couple who lives here, but I have a vague understanding of their objectives. They work quite a bit on appearances, landscaping, and such, and I think they throw a lot of parties. If they are building the place from the ground up, they’d be imagining how they’d best have people over to actually see the place. Entryway for leaving coats, living room for coffee, dining room for dinner. At this stage of American history, they also have some hired help, so the kitchen is tucked far away from everything else, out of sight. There should actually be a door between the kitchen and everything else, but I’ll fix that in a moment.<\/p>\n

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Now we’re getting somewhere! Light fixtures were installed, and some wallpaper as well. I’ve put an arch between the entryway and the dining room, which I am not entirely sold on yet, but we’ll see. Blue appears to be a color theme here, as it is outside with the flowers, so I’ll assume going forward that the original owners loved blue.<\/p>\n

The kitchen is painfully small, which is an unfortunate look into how the property owners consider their staff, but pretty common for the era.<\/p>\n

<\/div>
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The Sims 4 doesn’t have ‘period-friendly’ appliances for anything, really, but lucky for us we’re not staying in the 1900s, this is just a blueprint. Building in the past and bringing it into the present means we need to know where the pipes are, where the fridge later plugs in, etc. The later homeowners will have to grapple with where to put the laundry since when the house was built it was done by hand.<\/p>\n

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Ah, yes, speaking of, time for Mr. Hoadley’s Wood Block. The Sims 4 doesn’t offer electrical outlets of any kind, so we have to imagine up our own. Luckily, the square bracket keys\u00a0 [<\/strong> and ]<\/strong> offer different sizes of objects. Simply select the item in question, and press the right or left square bracket Left for smaller, right for bigger.<\/span> and find your object shrink and grow to the size you desire. That trick is useful all over the place, but here we’re going to use it to turn this wood chopping block into a little outlet cover.<\/span><\/p>\n

A wooden electrical socket sounds very safe.<\/div>
A wooden electrical socket sounds very safe.<\/div><\/p>\n

Obviously, it doesn’t have an actual outlet, but it isn’t too shabby for what we need it for. It would be far too easy to, down the line, simply place a lamp or TV anywhere we desire, we need the painful realism of groaning as the realization hits that we can’t.<\/p>\n

<\/div>
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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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alright, where we left off two weeks ago, we had just ‘finished’ the house’s facade. I’ve worked from a few reference images of real-life houses built in the early 1900s, but I’m mostly winging it. Half of the point of this project is to be low-maintenance while I get my bearings, so I suppose I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[639],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thesimsoverthinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55009"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55024,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55009\/revisions\/55024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}