Neohomes and Gardens

[Huggles]

Might as well see how this goes. This thread is for posting all of your neohome and garden related stuff. Finished rooms, unfinished projects, interesting homes you've seen, or whatever else.

First things first. The Neohomes and Gardens Guide by Cybraria is essential. It has everything you could ever want to know about neohomes. Plus, it hosts secret3191's aerial gude. Bascially, she's managed to collect just about every piece of furniture or gardening item in existence and placed them in homes spread across her accounts. However, my advice is to not get stuck on a particular item before finding out how much it will cost you. Even something as little as 20k may not seem like very much until you have to buy 15 more.

Cybraria, secret3191, and many previous spotlight winners post on the Spotlights and Galleries board on the neoboards. Yes, I know what you're thinking, but lurking and spying on other people's homes is fun stuff.

I guess I'll go first and post my only completed room again. I'm currently working on 4of11's bedroom, but you'll have to search for it because I don't like posting before I'm done. Feel free to post you rooms and gardens again. You know who you are.

Note: There is hidden music in my room. MWHAHAHAHA!

[Wingsrising]

To start off with, here are links to my previous Neohoming threads:
Stop me, before I Neohome again!
Oops!... I Neohomed Again.

So I've been on a mad crazy Neohoming binge for the last week and a half (largely, I think, as breaks from my nonNeohoming binge -- ie, I've been re-organizing my apartment and I bought and assembled new computer furniture).

So to start with: landings. I had three landings in my Neohome dating from before there were even any stairs for Neohomes. (Heck, dating from when you had to lock everything in place to keep the layers from jumping around.) Now that we had spiffy new stairs, I decided to update all my landings. (No, the landings don't quite fit together.)


This is the front entrance to my Neohome. You will note that, after buying a whole bunch of stairs, I decided I didn't like them and wanted to build stairs the old fashioned way after all. (Ignore the extra window.)

Redoing all three landings was actually something I did months ago, WAY back at the start of this latest redecoration. However, once I'd upgraded all the rooms around them, the new landings looked pretty plain. I made fairly minor changes to the second and third floor landings (I added the books and paintings to the second floor landing.) These are the pre-revamp and post-second-revamp rooms:





However, the revamped front entrance (first pair of pictures, on the right) really now looked much too plain. So I did a time-consuming, expensive, and totaly unexpected revamp:


Really, the only reason it was time-consuming is that it took a lot of tries to get the look I wanted, which was like one of the sunken pools they had in Ancient Egpyt or Rome.

Next up: the back entrance/workroom, where my Neopets paint, sculpt, and throw and fire pots (I want one of these in real life):


This was a pretty minor one. I've decided that, unless you're going for a certain rough-hewn look, stone furniture is best left for floors, etc. Otherwise it just looks cheap.

I redid one of my balconies already. Now it was time to redo the other. I managed to find a use for the stairs for this one.


For completeness, I'll add the upstairs bathroom. There's only an "after" shot since this one honestly didn't change all that much.



Finished last night, the workout room and armory, where Este practices her battle techniques and stores her weapons and trophies. (The stuff on the shelves on the left is supposed to be weapons, on the right is supposed to be trophies. I'm not sure how well it worked.) Ignore the junk in the entrance in the before picture, I took the screenshot after I loaded the first batch of new items into the room.


Also finished last night, the games room. This one also has no before, since this is a brand new room. Basically, I got the solitare table since I thought it was neat, then realized I wanted a video gaming system, then realized I needed a room to put it all in. The merry-go-round probably needs to be moved to the left but I don't feel like dealing with it. (Ask me how many merry-go-round bases I went through. OK, only 3, but it seemed like more.)



Last but not least, just finished an hour ago, my room! My old room was very boring: essentially all the cheapest furniture that looked decent I could find. This one is much nicer. I thought about theming it around a Nova bed (my favorite bed) but they're UB, so I decided the Electric bed was my second favorite bed and went for that one instead.

This was a deceptively expensive room, since for the most part no one item was super-pricey, but everything was moderately pricey and since there wasn't a lot of room for subsitution, it all added up. I'll recoup some of the losses by selling things that I tried for the mystic portal but didn't use.

I like the electronics but I'm still not sure about the mystic portal. I figured that I must have some way of traveling between Earth and Neopia, it must be magical, and I probably keep it locked away from my pets to keep them from stumbling into Earth. I tried scads and scads of things before thinking to myself that I wanted something like a hole or a pit... and then found it in the last item I ever thought I would have in my Neohome. I'm still not totally satisfied so if anyone has any suggestions, LMK. Link to my animated portal.



BTW, I <strike>stole</strike> was inspired by Huggles' use of the Altador pie plates for a curtain rod. If you're annoyed, LMK.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I'm not totally sure about all of these, especially the games room. It seems very weak to me somehow and I'm not sure what it needs. It sometimes feels like no matter how much work I put into these it's still not up to spotlight quality... but I try.

I now need a nice break. After that, two all-new showpeice (read: expensive) rooms to build and all my gardens. (I don't like gardening as much as Neohoming, so that will be a challenge.) Plus, possible tiling, fun fun.

[Marah]

Heh, I'm going to like this thread.

I really need to work on my neohoming but here are my two (only two) finished gardens again:




I really like your landings wingsrising. I agree that most of Neo's stairs don't look good, they seem too steep. I like the country stairs though.

About the games room, I don't know, the table in the left under corner is my favourite, it looks like an actual board game is being played there. I would consider moving it a bit more center so it gets more attention?
(Not sure if that is the advice you are looking for, but okay)
And as far as the portal goes: That idea is so cool, but the execution seems very dark, maybe add more shiny things to the doors?
But I really love the flashy console!

I also can't help wondering what the item is you never thought you would use, the grave or the discoball?

Also any advice on this garden is appreciated:
Rosegarden I don't know what would be the best way to fill actually everything behind the rose-arch...

[Huggles]

Marah: I have no idea. Maybe add a pond or two? The techo fountain pond you used before would match the red roses and the stylishly simple pond also has little red flowers. The archway looks very nice though.

Bgryph: I'm going to go through your post backwards, and there's nothing you can do about it! Anyway, I hardly think what amounts to little more than a line is stealing, so steal away.

As for your portal, again I dunno. I always imagined I'd just sort of automagically pop in and out, appearing and disappearing in fantastical sparkly glowing rings whenever I logged in or out. The blood on the doors reminds me of the Prestige and Hugh Jackman's character, google the secret ending if you haven't seen it, and is therefore creepier than normal. I approve of the electric furniture. It's the best drawn next to the nova stuff and looks quite comfy. I just wish there was something similar in purple. Maybe add another rug under the seating area and another side table next to your bed? I always picture what I'd want and would work in the real world first, then try to bend Neopets' miniscule furniture collection to my will.

I also really like your bilge dice board game thing. I have that petpet tunnel and was wondering what to do with it...I think I'll try to work it into 4's computer though. I think your armory/workout room looks fine. I thought about adding one to my home until I realized neither I nor my pets would ever actually use it. We is lazy. I might redo the armory as part of Kaotika's room though. Unlike you, I'm putting of doing my stairwells and layered rooms for as long as I can. Only my gardens will stay empty longer.

[Wingsrising]

I don't have any good suggestions re: the gardens, sorry. I'm not very good at gardens. If it were me I would probably stick two masses of cheap flowers in the back, one on each side, which probably means that's NOT the way to go.

I decided to tweak my room a little -- nothing wrong with it that 150k won't fix, right? I'm amazed at how expensive this room ended up being for being a fairly simple room. The revised version is here.. I think the "portal" area now looks a bit more colorful and less cramped.

I think the bed does look better with two side tables although I tend to associate two side tables with having another person in the bed, which I associate with sex, which I never get IRL let alone in Neopia... It looks good, though.

I think I'm going to scrap the idea of the merry-go-round. I really fell in love with the idea but in practice I don't think it's working, or at least I don't think it's working for that room. I'm thinking of turning it into one of those head-to-head ride-on video games, except with Unis.

Even though I practically built the room around the solitare table, I'm not sure I like how the solitare table looks. Dunno why.


The item I never thought I'd use was the open grave, since I don't really go for creepy-gothic horror type stuff. But I think it works for a mystic portal when the tombstone and the wiggling worms are covered.