How to build my house on the Sims
How I did it: I looked up a tutorial on houses built into hillsides and started with our basement. Just went from there and am now just whittling down the rooms I overestimated.
Lessons & tips: Look up tutorials online for any funky features your home has - modthesims2.com has a great forum
Get an idea of what you absolutely cannot do without. The homebuilder program is friendly but not perfect, so some things are either incredibly intricate and difficult or just plain won't work. Don't waste hours on some small detail that isn't important in the overall scheme.
Don't reinvent the wheel. Check download sites and browse homes that others have made to get an idea of what's possible, what's tricky and maybe what's already out there that can just be tweaked to match up to your home. For example, we have a 3-bedroom bungalow with a basement, so I searched for 'bungalow' and used the search parameters to narrow things down. (modthesims2.com is 100% free downloads, many other sites have all or mostly free downloads)
Be prepared to spend a little time, especially if you are working on something complicated and even if it seems like a cakewalk. I had a great time but 3 hours went by in a snap and I'm still tweaking a bit.
Resources: http://www.modthesims2.com
http://thesimsresource.com
http://mikeinside.modthesims2.com/tutorials.html
