I think Neogardens are too big. They're too deep from front to back: stuff at the back is WAY too small and it takes tons of items you can barely see to fill it up, stuff at the front can sometimes be way too big (although that isn't nearly as big a problem now as it was before the Great Neogarden Flower Shrinking, which helped that problem but created the "what to do with the back" problem -- as well as ruining all the gardens already created).
I also don't like the control system, where you have to guess at where the controls for any particular item are. At least with Neohoming if you're patient enough you can use the item list for the room to select a hard-to-select item.
Lastly, I hate the way that items change layering as you move them (or other items) around.
However, it seems to be an unwritten Neohome Spotlight rule that the first floor must be completely full -- if not with rooms, than with gardens. So, that means I need 14 of the things. On the bright side, a lot of beautiful new flowers have come out since the last time I Neogardened, plus a lot of lovely (and CHEAP!) knicknacks, fountains, etc.
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I started with a simple flower garden to get warmed up:
Before. I had tried to repair this after the Great Neogarden Flower Shrinking, but not really entirely successfully.
After. Why yes, I have heavily relied on symmetry in making my gardens. I'm apparently not creative enough, garden-wise, for asymmetry.
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Next, my back porch (and entrance to the road to Neopia Central). This one I was sort of excited about because I got to play with all the cool new cheap furniture that had come out since I last designed it.
Before. IIRC, this was the only complete set of cheap furniture back then (Although my standards for what constitutes "cheap" have changed a lot: when I did this the first time, I thought 5k was a lot for a flower...)
After. Look at all the knickknacks and trees I got to play with! You can't see in this screenie, but the fire in the stove is animated, too.
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The veggie garden was actually mostly untouched by the Great Neogarden Flower Shrinking, which is good because I forgot to take a "before" picture of it. This is a very old pic, from before the Shrinking. I'd added a Marrow Garden (and replaced the Spiky Bush with a Blackberry Bush, since the Spiky Bush was one of the items that was shrunk in the Shrinking) but this is pretty representative of how it looked before:
This was actually the hardest garden to do so far. I went through 4 incarnations, the first two of which I was unhappy with, the 3rd I was OK with but thought I can do better. I have screenies of all 4, but I'll only inflict the final (so far) version on you:
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Now, for rooms with no "BEFORE" pictures.
There actually was a backyard playground "before" but I totally forgot to take a "before" picture. While I have an old screenie, that was a garden that WAS heavily affected by the Shrinking. (It looked good before, the Shrinking, horrible after).
Anyway, the swings, pool, and some of the cobblestone bridges were in the old version, but the other fun new playground items weren't:
While working on the backyard I found myself trying (and failing) to work in the cute new skittles game, cricket set, etc. There didn't seem to be any place to put it, and anyway (I thought) there was no room in the playground to play cricket or croquet anyway. I started wondering if cricket was played on a special field (as baseball is) and several Wikipedia articles and 90k of Zorbamints later, I had another garden room down (fairly) inexpensively.
I am sort of hoping the Yooyu ball field looks like the cricket pitch. It's not perfect, but I had one from last year's Altador Cup, it's too small to be useful as an actual Yooyu field, and Neopets has a shortage of cricket-pitch-shaped garden items. I went with the 6-wicket style of croquet played outside of North America (don't you love Wikipedia) instead of the American 9-wicket version. This is because Neopia is outside of North America, and, more importantly, 6 wickets are cheaper than 9 wickets.
In most of the rooms above I solved the "back of garden" problem by fencing off the back half of the garden, and just threw trees, etc. there since that part was outside "my yard". Since the lawn is in front of the house, I couldn't do that, but I didn't feel like buying enough Zorbamints to fill in the back either. I'm not totally happy with the shrubs... but I still don't feel like buying enough Zorbamints to fill in the back.
Last but not least, a spiffy new front entrance... which because unexpectedly expensive given how sparse it is because I fell in love with the Pink Morning Glory Vines growing on each front gate... at 45k a pop. (That's one of the reasons the rest of it IS so sparse, in fact. I think it's sort of pretty that way but am open to suggestion.)
Phew. That's 7 down, 7 to go. The good new is, I have ideas for some of the rest of them. The bad news is, I don't have ideas for ALL of the rest of them...
