I'm finally getting round to doing up my own house. I've gone back to the first house I ever had - the Neo by Fade Languish at Cult Living. I've never found a better one for my needs, so thanks, Fade :) One day I might build my own from scratch but until then this is perfect. The only thing it's missing is a bathroom, so I added a small shower room. It's still a work in progress though...
Me and Simon are building a home together on Safe Harbor, using a prefab from Dharma, which we are modding. In the meantime, I have suspended a den-cum-office-cum-temporary bedroom 300m above the new house.
The skybox is a New York loft; I removed the New York skyline and inserted a London view instead. Simon wants to use his furniture in the new place, which is fine with me, of course, but I have a soft spot for this sofa etc. so I will keep it up here.
One of the problems I had with the wraparound panorama is that the image was reversed by the interior wall of the curve on the right hand side, if that makes sense. In the end, I simply uploaded another version of the same panel, which I had reversed in Photoshop using the mirror command, and that worked quite well.
RL intervened in June and July. What a shitty couple of months. My fellow prawns have been having a few problems too. For a while, I thought Safe Harbor had been cursed by some sort of powerful mage.
Three things I must rectify immediately now I have returned:
I started work on number 3 this morning: I finished the treehouse. It has a vaguely neko theme, with a few cat toys and snuggles, and a cat loo, but it can be used by anyone. It's just an ambient place to hang out. However this still leaves the following projects to finish: Little Nara, the Blossom Tree Island, the floating palaces (might get rid of them altogether), the beach on the spa island, and the gazebo in my back yard.
I also have to sort my inventory, which has nearly 10,000 items in it. Aieee!
Lovely Gabe wants a bathroom in his house, so I have offered to build an extension. When I realized I couldn't get hold of the textures used by the original builder, and that in order to build the extension, I would have to kick Gabe out of his house while I ripped out walls and moved stuff around, I bought a copy of his house, rezzed it on some spare land, and set about cannibalizing it to make the extension. It's a very sweet country-style cottage, with nice layout, but it's a bit pokey, and because it was designed to be low-prim, the creator (Sandy Clymer) had to sacrifice prettiness for prims.
Happily, Gabe agreed to let me tweak the textures and clean up the design a bit during the rebuild. I put in a simple white wooden staircase (replacing the one-prim ramp), added an extra wing at the back of the house for the upstairs bathroom and a downstairs family den, and changed the roof tiles to a dark slate pattern which is classic New England, but which ties in his house to the colour scheme of my modern house, giving Safe Harbor a little more unity.
I ripped out the old fireplace, which was just a one-prim illustration, and installed a new one, complete with crackling, smoking flames, glowing logs and a chimney with smoke coming out of it. I'm also tarting up the interior walls, giving him smart Cape Cod-style whitewashed oak woodwork and wainscoting, and plaster walls in pale sky blue, pale lavender and a rich cornflower blue. "Real" windows with shutters will be installed, and curtains will be hung on the inside. Other plans (apart from the bathroom and den): a new kitchen with a working fridge and washing machine, a proper dining room, a new front door and a working doorbell, and a small back yard leading off from the den, where Gabe can hang his washing on the line and store logs for his log fire.
On 19 April, we had a short community meeting at Safe Harbor, during which I listed all my unfinished projects, feeling like a bit of a dilettante, and then we discussed having a beach party for our friends on the spa island. In order to do this, I will have to make a beach, which means mastering waves... aieeee!
For the record, my unfinished projects are:
* My own bathroom (missing a tiny section of the tiled floor)
* Gabe and Micah's bathroom extension
* The private Arabian sky palace (needs some texturing of the building and the furnishings, and relocation to 700 feet)
* The Arabian-style floating pleasure gardens (just needs some gates, some soft furnishings, lighting, and a little exotic planting)
