Geez! Has it really been so long since my last blog post? Sometimes, I swear I forget I even have a blog! Anyway, a couple of months ago, I actually moved to a sim that I LOVE. It's a small, cozy, family sim that really just has one extended family living on it. I consider myself very, very lucky to have been chosen to live among them. Of course, as soon as I saw the opportunity to live there, I jumped on it. However, I never really posted about it, I'm not sure why. Even in my last blog post, where we are packing to go to Greece, I took the photo there. I didn't even mention it, oops!

While I have been living there, I haven't really put much effort into making it 'home' though. I had a house, furniture, and a little bit of landscaping, but eh. I was growing bored with the house, and decided to get a new one. Once I plopped the new house on the land, I really made an effort into making it feel like a place I will feel proud of. After all, I love living on this sim, I should show it!

I spent all weekend trying to figure out what I want to do with it, adding furniture, buying new furniture, landscaping it.... It's been rough! But, I finally got a result I am in love with!

The front of the house. It's peaceful, happy, and looks like it belongs in a postcard, I think. LOL! I love the front of this house, cause of the front deck. I chose this house for fall, because of the decking. I LOVE to decorate for the seasons, and this will make a fantastic place for fall pumpkins, jack-o-lanterns, and all the adorable Halloween things! I'm so hoping that the House To House Trick or Treating happens again, I loved it so much last year!


The back of the house! I have a little pond area, and off to the left side of the photo is a little cinema/movie area. I do need to find some outdoor seating for it that I like, so that's a work in progress right now. Also, the upstairs deck is a work in progress as well, as I need even more outdoor seating up there! (Why are they so difficult to find?)

But, all in all, not bad! I'm really proud of it!

During the house-to-house trick or treating, we visited a few houses that were part of actual family communities. I did not even realize that these sort of things existed! I absolutely loved the community feel of them! I say often that my family isn't big on the "role-play" aspect, like, we don't really do mealtimes, or tuck-ins... but we do things like PaleoQuest, pumpkin carving, and movie nights. But for some reason, the family sims really appealed to me. I think for a couple of hidden reasons.

First, we have decided to move halfway across the country in RL, early next year. Because of this, we need to cut un-needed expenses out of our life. The sim is the first thing that is not absolutely necessary. Second, our sim is just WAY too big. We are a small family of three, and we don't utilize it all. We had one party for Yuna's adoption, we sometimes watch a movie at our outdoor cinema, and we stand in the house to AFK. That's about it. All of these things, we can do on a smaller piece of land. Third, our house was way too big. I loved the house when I bought it, it's gorgeous, and the type of house I'd love to live in RL. However, for us, it was just too much space. But really, the cost of the sim was the main reason for the decision. 

As much as I say I'm not a "RP" type of person, I think I'm craving just a little bit more of it! I LOVE that you have to have a driver's license to drive on the family sims, you have to stop at stop lights and all that. These communities seem to have a police force, firefighters, playgrounds, and city hall. It's so much fun! I spent a good 2-3 days hopping from one sim to another, reading covenants, trying to find the perfect house.

Eventually, I found it. Well, it was mainly the plot I fell in love with! The back of the house is right on the lake, the front of the house is facing the road, so I can see people driving by and all. It has it's own fence, came with some landscaping already put down. The price is much more do-able than what we were paying for the sim (we can almost pay a whole month here with what we were paying a week for the sim), and the prim limit is SO generous. I was done putting down all the things that I wanted from the old house, and I was not even halfway though our given prim allowance. I was completely amazed!

However, I did opt to purchase my own home, and because it was an "approved house," I got to use it. It's smaller two bedroom, one bath home from Roost. I love Roost Homes, they are very beautiful, and completely customizable. I find you can tint... everything! Doors, ceilings, walls, exteriors... I love it! The Rules notecard I was given from the community manager says that if you use your own home, you are given a prim allowance that won't count against your prims, but when I check on the prim counter, my home counts against me. I'll see what happens later, when/if we ever need more prims.

Of course, it's still a work in progress, I haven't committed to an exterior paint color, and I still have some landscaping and all to do... but, I just got it yesterday! I'm still playing with things outside, but I am very happy that I was able to secure this plot, and this house! It's so perfect for us!

Yay, my graphics drivers have been fixed on the upgrade to Windows 10! It was terrible, instant blue screen of the computer crashing as soon as it booted up. I only had about 15 seconds to end all AMD processes before it crashed, then I had to disable the graphics card. Luckily, updated graphics drivers fixed the issue and I was only complaining about it for about half a day before they were fixed. Woo! Apparently it was affecting my particular brand of laptop. Who cares, I'm not broken anymore!

Anyway, ages ago, I found myself in need of a prefab, and was wandering around looking at these huge, mansion homes. It was incredible. I kept thinking: Who really needs more than one bedroom? Who would pay over $4,000L for a house? Who really needs that much SPACE? I was boggled. I hunted down a post where I briefly touched on it. (Dang, I was really depressed back there in 2008, wasn't I?)

The funny thing is: I seem to have become exactly *that* person. With us wanting to adopt a child, I find that our current house is not as big as I wish it to be. Plus, the longer I have the house, I keep noticing a gap here, a bigger gap there. I like room to grow with, a room where my alt can do her thing, and large, spacious rooms. I have been actively looking for a house like this, and ironically - Could not find a house that I really liked that was big enough. With us wanting a family, obviously we wanted a dedicated kitchen, dining room, living space, bathroom and at least two bedrooms. I had other specifications that needed to be met as well. I wanted the mouldings to be mesh, and not just be a texture, tintable walls, an optional snow add-on, and baked shadows.

I hunted and looked until I came across a particular one from Roost. It was love at first sight for me, and met every prerequisite I had for a home. The downfall: the price, at $5,100L. I TP'ed Jeffry over who gave me the linden to buy it, and told me to just "get it if you like it".

Of course, I hunted around a little bit more, looked through over 75 pages of listings on the marketplace... I'm going to try to break my habit of changing homes so often, so I really needed to LOVE this house, and know that it's the one that I am going to stick with. I did not really want to spend so much $L on it just to find a home I like better in the next couple days.

I couldn't find another that I liked as much as this East Ives house. I bought it, and eventually plan on getting the matching guest house. I put it down on the land, and it was so much bigger than my house I had before, I had to terraform. I eventually just leveled the hill behind the house, so now the back porch has a great view as well.

I love it now even more than I did before I bought it. Right now, it's completely perfect for us, and hopefully, our family. I'm not going to complain about the price either, as it's a very beautifully done house. I have yet to come across any issues with it, unaligned textures, gaps, anything. It's got several different options with it (two attic rooms, vs. one giant attic room) - and... well, it's just freaking gorgeous.

So, we've been working quite a bit on the sim recently. Jeffry is really into making our sim child-friendly, and providing many things for our child to do, when we find a girl that meshes well with us. He's purchased us a couple of games, like Simopolis, LifeStyle, and Greedy Greedy. He also got a playground, a outdoor cinema complete with popcorn machine, and lemonade.

For appearances, we also changed the sim from the palm tree, sand and grass mix I had going on. Jeffry saw this beautiful photo from Alicia, and he asked me - "How does she get photos so realistic?" I explained the process of taking photos to him, and the only thing he got out of our conversation, was the mountain sim surround thing in the background. He wanted one. I found where they sold them, and he fell in love with one particular set, only because it had a huge waterfall. So, we bought it, and sadly, it was complete with fir trees and all - I had to get rid of my half beach and palm trees.

I hunted down some fir's to replace my palms, and found some beautiful ones from LAQ. They are animated, and also came with winter versions, that look snowy! We love to change things for the seasons, and we completely plan to switch things to snow in the winter, so it's fabulous that a lot of the things we got on the sim, have snow versions! The house came with roof snow and Christmas lights, the pool I bought from The Loft has a covered snow version as well. It's really great, that designers are doing this - it used to be really difficult to find snow things in SL! Everyone loves beaches and stuff, it was kind of hard to find anything else.

Mesh is incredible. It's amazing that we have most of our sim filled up, all this grass, trees, incredible prefabs, a house filled with furniture, yet, we have still over 1,500 prims left on our Homestead sim. It's amazing what you can do with only 1 land impact now!

I love to build buildings and stuff using regular prims. The disappointing part of that, is that prims are becoming obsolete now that mesh is taking over everything. I know a bit about clothing and Blender, but when it comes to making furniture and builds, I have no idea what's going on. I decided to make the purchase, and get myself The Mesh Studio. A long time ago, I purchased the Sculpt Studio, and had no idea what to do with it. I went to a couple of classes, and still never utilized it.

So, I took the chance and purchased the Mesh Studio, and before I even opened the box, I decided to find a class on it. This way, I'm not overwhelmed before I even begin. I found a class at the Builder's Brewery, and I've really forgotten how much I enjoy going to classes in SL! I love learning how to create all kinds of things, so I think I might make it my own personal mission to go to more classes, and build up my skills. I hear they have Blender/Mesh classes, I'm going to try to get in on some of them.

From the class, it seems the Mesh Studio is so much easier to pick up and learn than the Sculpt Studio was! It seems to be just build what you want, drop a script in it, download from the link it spits out at you, then upload to SL. Of course there's other, minor things to do in all of that as well, but it's not at all complicated like the Sculpt Studio is/was.

I've finally finished decorating my sim! Wow, what a huge different mesh makes in prim counts! I mean, we have like 3,750 prims to play with on our homestead, and I finished putting all my furniture, horses and landscaping out with over 2,800 to spare! It's incredible! I don't even know how I lived with sculpted prims, let alone regular prims now.

So much space! Seriously, what do people put on homestead sims? I have a house and some landscaping, and a pavilion, not sure what else I need? I have a ton of prims, and a ton of empty space!


I wandered around from store to store, looking at prefabs. I wanted one bigger than the Vicious Decay house I currently had, and it had to be affordable. Unfortunately, I failed. I fell in love with one from Barnesworth, but it didn't have baked ambient occlusion textures. I was even looking at one from Scarlet Creative, but I wasn't sure about all the white. Particularly the white roof. I loved another one from Trompe Loeil, but it was small and I wasn't a fan of the layout. I know I'm really picky about my prefabs. I came across this one. I wasn't love at first sight for me, as many of my prefabs are. It was sized waaaay small for my camera settings, as I prefer my houses unproportional to the avatar. This one was realistic sized.

But it was able to be modified, so I bought it and scaled it larger. Once I had it all rezzed out. the result is much better, I think. Of course it required more land impact than the original, but I didn't mind that! One of the really cool selling points of this house is that all the walls are tintable. In my experience, tintable walls look terrible, but these - actually look beautiful while tinted. The house came with white walls, but I made mine a light grey, and it really looks like the house came that way!

Last post, I showed the blog the outside of my home, today, we'll explore the inside! Yay! Keep in mind that I have a small-ish prim budget, so I don't have as many decorations as I'd like, but really, who does? Anyway, on to the inside!

My living room. I'm slowly replacing things and adding new things constantly, my inventory is pretty outdated, from being out of SL for so long. But as I hit more sales, and events, the bigger it grows, and more possibilities I have. I LOVE the french doors leading into this room, they really do open like real french doors!

The wall has a bunch of pictures, detailing various bits of our SL journey together.


Next, we move into my dining room. I had a smallish set from LAQ to match the bookshelves, but when I went to the Trompe Loeil sale earlier in the week, I fell absolutely in love with this dining room. Honestly, I probably would have been fine with my old set, but once I saw the paisley tablecloth.... it was mine. There is never enough paisley in the world for me. And naturally, I had to get the matching chairs, right? Currently looking for a beautiful set of mesh flowers to finish this room out.


Kitchen. Yes, yes. It's small, sad and uneventful. However, why waste prims when I don't cook in the first place? It's functional for heating up leftover prim takeout, that's all I need! Again, another sale purchase.


The staircase that leads upstairs. Every girl needs a washer and dryer, right!? These are very old cube versions, I'm holding out until I find some fabulous mesh ones to replace these!


Upstairs is a series of 3 rooms. When I first rezzed the house, I gave Jeffry an option to pick a room. He is scripting in world now, and doesn't like to pick up his prims. No one like random plywood cubes scattered around their land! So, as long as he's in his room, I won't complain. And that's what he does. Rezzes prims. Soon, there will be so many boxes on the floor, I wont be able to open the door.


Across the hall from his mancave, is the bedroom. Lots of seating, for lots of photo taking. I like this room!


And as for the last room upstairs, another work in progress! This is the bathroom, still adding to this room as well!

As the early history of my blog shows, I love to blog about the recent homes that I live in. When I go back and look into the archives of this blog, one of my favorite parts of it is looking at the different houses I had. It says a lot about what is popular on the grid at that time, and how I feel at that time. It's really a snapshot of that time for me! And I enjoy reading back on these type of posts.

I rent a sky dome from Bella Pointe. They offer spacious domes, with a reasonable prim allowance. When it was just me, I rented the smallest dome, which covers a 1/4 of a sim. You don't get the prims of a 1/4 sim, obviously, but the space is really nice. When Jeffry also decided to come back to SL, the prim allowance that they gave me wasn't really sufficient anymore. So we upgraded to the 1/2 sim size. And honestly, it is much more space than I know what to do with!

I mean, it's huge! Each dome has it's own lake/lagoon, which is nice, but I never use it. It makes the dome look better than just a platform of grass, however. Our current dome even comes with 2 waterfalls and a cave (the 1/4 sim had only 1 waterfall). Sometimes I really miss having the real linden water, but, I figure if I really need it for photos or something, there's tons of beach sims out there.


I have a little beach area as well, onto which I put out some beach chairs. I'm not missing out on anything other than the real water by being in a skybox.


I have a lot of open space, mainly because the whole reason I have this place is for my breedables. My horses need room to roam and graze, right? I put down a bunch of grass because I don't like the look of just a flat prim. 

My dome I had before this one was a beach themed, so I had palm trees, sand, the works. However, I really prefer the meadow-y type of  land, so this time I chose the mountain style. It works wonderfully, because I love the dimension that the grass gives, and it doesn't look too terribly out of place, like it would on a beach. I had some beach grass, but it looked a bit weird with the whole ground covered in it.


This house! Let me just stop and talk about how much I love this house. I wanted a mesh house that would not take up a ton of prims, because we have a huge space and a smallish prim limit. I was searching the marketplace, and was finding all kinds of beautiful (yet extremely expensive) homes, then this one came up in the listings.... Just when I was thinking it might be more cost effective to make my own, now that I'm comfortable in Blender. Anyway, I immediately went to the location to see it in world. Once it rezzed, I was blown away at how beautiful, detailed and cheap it was. I mean, only L$99, and 68 land impact? Sold. This picture is actually the front doorway.


And a quick photo of the back door, which joins to the kitchen, and comes off onto a little balcony. So cute!


On the other side of my dome, I have my gorgeous Country Pavilion that I picked up from the Trompe Loeil sale a couple days ago! The amount of love I have for this beauty... I can't even say. It's a little more land impact than I originally waned to spend, but, I love this so much that I really don't care anymore. I knew I wanted some kind of gazebo, or something in this space, so the sale came at such a wonderful time for me!


When I'm not hosting, I spend a lot of my in-world time in here, laying on the outdoor daybed. I have firefly particles throughout my open area as well. One of the most beautiful parts of my RL moving in with Jeffry is the fireflies where we live. I wanted a little piece of them in my SL, too!

Unfortunately, I had purchased a set of really gorgeous fireflies, which rezzed temporary prims to operate. My land policies notecard states I am prohibited from having any object that rezzes temp prims. I was very disappointed. Since the fireflies were no copy/transfer, I sent the creator a notecard, inquiring about a refund. No word from him yet, so I guess we'll see. :(

Part two will be coming next - the inside of the house!

Trompe Loeil is having a huge 50% off sale on everything for the next few days, and I went yesterday as soon as I heard about it. When the news came to me, the only words that came out of my mouth was... "Oh, no." Being out of SL for so long, the one thing you notice is that your inventory is extremely outdated, including furniture. Decorating a house is terrible when all you have is sculpted prims. Now there's mesh, and everything is so low prim. I feel like all my furniture now is a waste of prims. This sale was awesome, and well timed for me!

I spent way too much linden. My husband kept telling me to leave that place, but I couldn't help it! It did not help the situation that we had just gotten a new mesh house, and I needed things to fill it.

One of the most awesome things I bought from the sale was this incredible hanging outdoor bed. I love it! However, one of the best buys that I got, was that the Country Pavillion was set to $150L, and with the sale, it was still half off of that! So incredible, I am so happy with what I bought, and I feel like my new prefab is a little more up to date then what it was! Even Jeffry took a break from scripting to try out the new outdoor bed with me.

A blog post on my new home is coming soon!

Oops. I forgot to mention that my second skybox was finished and put up on the Second Life Marketplace for purchase. This one has 2 rooms, for whatever purpose you want to use them for (I intended one to be a study, the other to be a living room), a kitchen/dining room area, a small patio, and a bedroom.

This skybox is pink and a little girly, but perfect for spring. I think it turned out pretty cute. I put sculpted doors and windows in this one, and my standard arches. I love doorway arches. I can't get enough of them.

And yes, I did turn on shadows to take these photos, they don't have that super-fancy baked lighting stuff. If you want to buy the skybox, it's here for a simple $40L. :)

I really enjoy building. I like to get out a piece of paper, draw out a basic floor plan, label where windows, arches and doors will go, and then watch it come to life as I build it with prims. I love the small accomplishments that I do while building - the feeling of finishing the building, then the texturing, then the overall good feeling when I'm looking at the boxed up package. It's fantastic. That's probably why I'm building so much lately.

This skybox, I'm calling "The Abana". Will have a study, living room, small space for a washer and dryer, a large bedroom, a large joined kitchen / dining room space, and a cute little patio. I've just finished texturing it today, I'm currently working on scripting the doors, then I get to box it. I'm thinking, it should be up on the marketplace by tomorrow evening. I'm excited for it. :)

And yes, it is pink.

I actually started created something again! No, not poses, but a prefab! Jeffry and I moved out of our parcel on Bluebonnet, we aren't in SL together much to really justify such a large chunk of land anymore... So, we got a smaller piece of land, and we needed a new house.


I couldn't find a prefab I really liked - so I made my own. I've been working on it on and off for the past couple weeks, and I finally finished it. I wasn't really intending to put it up for sale, but I was pleased with how it came out, so I thought I would share it. It's called "The Halona", and if you want to check it out, you can find it on the marketplace here. (By the way, it's only $40L!)

Also, in other news, I took the time last weekend to actually put my [ImpEle] poses on the marketplace. Because I don't have an in-world store anymore for people to try out the poses, they are super cheap! Only about $15L per pose pack. And yes, the free animation overrides are back.

But other than that, I have been switching back and forth between World of Warcraft and Second Life. Sometimes I can't decide which of the two I want to do, so I find myself logged into both at once, flipping back and forth. I'm skilled like that. Yep.

Alicia Chenaux is doing the Big Bad Blogger Challenge again this year, and you know I had to participate. I love the BBBC, so it should be fun to blog every day this week. I even decided I would blog every day for one week on my fashion-y blog too. Maybe I'll get to clear out some outfit photos I've been hoarding.