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| Our New Mansion |
There are some wonderful builds out there. Many of them have been on the market for years. It's fairly easy to tell how long a house has been listed. First of all, mesh is a fairly new feature of SL so any house with mesh components in it will be relatively new. But first and foremost will be the cost of the house. Back when the economy in SL was strong, house builders were fetching thousands, if not tens of thousands of lindens for their creations. For example, we ran into a modest 2 bedroom contemporary house listed at over L$4000. Then the next place we visit, we find a partial mesh house with 4 bedrooms and lots more space for just L$500. Those higher prices are from years ago when thousands of lindens was the going rate for houses and they have simply not lowered their prices yet to compete with the newer economy.
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| Living Room by cat |
Another problem was one of the creators of houses did not have a location in SL where you could walk through his houses. They looked great in 2D on the Marketplace. But you cannot buy a house for thousands of lindens without experiencing it first. His creations looked wonderful and I almost certainly would have purchased from him had he had a place to browse his homes. Fortunately, everyone else did have temporary rezzed homes for us to experience. Most of the homes had very few usable rooms in them, just like our current home. I began to have second thoughts and actually considered dropping my car and space station projects to create a custom home for us. But then we ran into Envision Prefabs. I paid these people L$1500 but I still think they deserve a plug. They had exactly what we were looking for at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Envision%20Blvd/182/117/24
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| Incomplete Kitchen |
I feel the L$1500 is a modern, updated price and worthy of the mansion. Did I say mansion? Yes, it's not just a house. So when I first went through this place, I decided right there and then that every other mansion was going to have to be compared to this one. As it turns out, we came close to finding something comparable, but there would be something wrong with it such as cost or number of rooms or wasted space. The place we purchased our current home at, InVerse had a lot of problems with it. First of all, they have 4 temporary rezzers with only 3 of them in working order. They had some great places but it was too busy there and it took two days before cat could grab a rez controller. I had to stand guard at the rez controller or someone else waiting in line would have grabbed it. The prices here were quite low for what you get, so I can understand why the place was so busy, but they really need to accommodate that kind of a crowd. They need another sim with at least 4 more rezzers on it. So that place left a sour taste in our mouths, despite the fact that we liked a couple of the places they had there. Then there was that Serenity Designs. They did not have an inworld place to view their homes but they sure did look great on the 2D ads. We would have likely purchased from them if the houses were anywhere near as good as they looked on the Marketplace, but a home MUST be walked through in 3D first. It's just common sense. Whomever created the mansion we did end up purchasing, should be thanking the creator(s) of Serenity Designs for forcing us their way.
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| Game Room |
Regardless, I'm very pleased with the mansion we ended up with. We took extra time from our work day yesterday to delete our old house and terraform the parcel to accommodate our new home. Then we went about landscaping and decorating. This task will mostly be for my girl to accomplish, but I did have a few things I needed to place out, such as teleporters and beds and stuff. I did run out of time and had to leave for dinner, leaving cat there to work on her furniture pack placement. She did a great job! We have more rooms than we need right now but I'm confident we will fill them up. What we needed was; a living room, formal dining room, dinning room, kitchen, master bedroom, master bath, room for kaz, office, game room and punishment room and garage. We have all of that plus two rooms I do not know what to do with just yet and these rooms are all huge! In comparison, our old home took up just a little less space but only had five rooms; living room, dining room, bedroom, office and bath. The old house did it in 3 stories where this new mansion does it in 2 stories. It will be a challenge for cat to fill these spacious rooms, but I'm confident she is up for it.
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| Incomplete Office |
Now I do not know how many prims our old house used up, but this new one uses over 850 unfurnished. So it did not take long last night to run our land down to 500 free prims out of 7500. Keeping in mind that a good chunk of those 7500 prims should be available to our daughter Neva, I went about looking for ways to reduce the prim count being on the parcel. First of all were all the prims owned by people who no longer visit nor use the property. Whisper, Pearl and Joe were the first to have their stuff removed. Jojo too had a bunch of prims I returned to her. Then there was my 'sandbox' building platform. I had a lot of prims on there that I'm not working with anymore. Beds, cars, etc. So I just picked them all up. Then I went up to the cuddle forest. I was asked by cat if that forest is ever used and I could not not think of anyone using it. I had used it most recently with starie, but that was quite a while back, and before then? Nobody that I'm aware of. So I started returning cat's stuff from there, but she had so much that I stopped because I didn't want her inventory getting filled up with misplaced returned items. Yes, SL does not always put your returned items back where they belong in your inventory. Most things end up in Lost & Found and have to be sorted.
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| Incomplete Master Bedroom |
So by that time, I had freed up well over 600 prims for a total of nearly 1200. That should allow cat enough to work with and if we become pinched for prims again, I can always go through and pick up some of the club stuff or racetracks, etc. The castle is well over 100 prims plus the stuff that's inside of it and so far as I can tell, nobody uses it. But we'll see. It probably won't come to that.
