Building My House on Tuscany Island

Wow, has it been a month-and-a-half since my last post? Where did all that time go? Well, another fabulous—if I may say so :-)—issue of Prim Perfect magazine came out, so that was part of it. And I’m also gearing up to design a new magazine under the Prim Perfect Publications umbrella—it will focus on Caledon and similar time-period sims (roughly 1700s to 1920s), with the first issue out in May. Zoe Connelly (of the Connelly Telegraph) will be the editor.

I’ve also been in a sort of funk, wanting to start building my house but rather scared to start. I’ve built some furniture and odd-and-ends, but nothing on this scale before. What if I fail? What if people think it’s ugly? How much do I need planned beforehand? So I’ve sat on my hands for the last month, content to do social things in SL.

Then fate kicked my butt and forced the issue.

One of my neighbors, who owned three plots on Tuscany Island, decided to move. Long story short—and it’s an interesting tale of struggling to communicate with someone who speaks only a little English and a lot of Italian when I speak a lot of English and only a little Italian (some of it hand gestures)—I bought his two plots in the southeast corner of the sim and Saffia (editor of Prim Perfect magazine and my neighbor) acquired his third plot and my old plot, which are adjacent.

[As a small aside, here's an example of trying to communicate with my Italian neighbor through Babbler:

Me: May I go inside? (DaVinci was showing me his new house)
DaVinci Leonard: tutti collegati e sui 2 fronti avrei anche il mare
Babbler3.17: all it connects to you and on the 2 foreheads I would have also the
sea

Granted, I think he was replying to something I'd said earlier, and it wasn't always that confusing, but it was a challenge. :-)]

So I took all of my stuff back into my inventory, returned the house I’d borrowed from Saffia, and stared at my new empty double plot, homeless. I really had no excuse not to start building now.

Heh. I found I could still procrastinate this indefinitely.

About a week later Roberto, a friend from Caledon, IM’d me to see how I was doing. I’d expressed interest in seeing a house he’d built himself and he was calling to find out if I’d like to come see it. It was a simple, nicely-built Victorian abode. I asked about textures and scripts for doors and windows, and he said a majority of that stuff he’d picked up for free—googling images for textures and trolling through the free items available on SLExchange.

See, a voice said in the back of my head, this doesn’t have to be hard. You don’t have to have all original textures and you don’t have to build everything from scratch.

But I don’t have everything planned out! I whined back. I don’t know exactly what the front porch is going to look like and exactly how the tower is going to attach to the main part of the house and what dimensions everything is going to be and…and…

Building is a creative process, the voice replied patiently. Like a river, it flows, and trying to have everything set in stone before you actually start dams the flow (and damns the flow). Go build. Enjoy the process. Don’t worry about what the neighbors think.

So I did. I plunged into the tumbling waters of creativity (okay, that was a florid metaphor, but it fits the water theme of the previous paragraph) and laid the foundation. A day later I had a few walls, and a couple of days after that I had floors for the ground floor, ceilings, and a front and back door (purchased). A query to the Caledon list about where to find a pair of nice french doors resulted in followmeimthe Piedpiper just up and giving me the doors from her inventory (Wow! I should ask about things more often!).

So here are the beginnings. I want to put stained glass panels over both the front and back doors but I need to create the panels first, so that’s why the middle of the house doesn’t have walls yet. The texture for the exterior walls I scanned from a book about Tuscany and I’m very happy with it.

Here’s a look of the back at the lovely free! french doors. Saffia suggested yesterday that I raise the ceilings on the first floor (I agreed with her), so I not only raised them, but converted the ceiling in the living room to a cathedral. I like the new height a lot better. The big drawback? Now the exterior walls are too short and the second story windows too low.

Ah well. Building is a creative process and it flows and changes. The important thing is that I’ve started. And I’m enjoying it.

~ by perryapplemoor on April 3, 2008.