Laundry Room, Workshop and Rear Porch

The laundry room is an important one in For Better or For Worse, as it is where Elly must spend most of her time (when not in the kitchen drinking coffee), as she was so often shown toting a mountain of laundry around.  Here's the laundry / sewing room:

My interpretation below.  There isn't a sewing machine available for the Sims, or at least not in the official releases.  That's a shame, actually, as it could be a useful tool for self-employed Sims who want start a small sewing school.

The official floor plan seems to indicate that the small room with the stained glass window (just noticed that I overlooked adding one!) is a bathroom, so I've added one.  Even if it isn't one in the strip, another bathroom is much welcomed in an eight-Sim household!

I hope the above picture makes sense.  The room at the left is the workshop, then the laundry room where I have replaced the sewing machine with some clothes-drying racks and a laundry hamper, and the room at the front left is part of the garage.  The front door is showing at the lower right.

Speaking of the workshop:

Well, the Sims is sadly lacking in the amount of model trains available, but there are three along the back and left wall in my version:

 

Also in here is a workbench (lower right corner of the room) which Sims can use to gain skill points as inventors, and lots of miscellaneous tools and storage units to try to give the feel of a workshop.  Two major differences here: the window, which I felt was necessary to break up the expanse of brick wall outside, and the desk area instead of a model train set.  The desk has a laptop on it: this is Mike's child-free hidey-hole for his writing.

The rear porch looks like this in the strip:

and this in my game:

There wasn't a small enough fir tree to put next to it, so I put in some hydrangeas or something. Although April and the dogs used to sneak under the deck in the strip, the Sims version doesn't give the option not to have wooden slats.  I have hidden a gnome in the garden right next to where April would hide, though.

Another change here is the wooden pillar just to the right of the stairs.  This is supporting the upper floor just where Elizabeth's room overhangs the deck.  In order for me to get all the furniture in that is shown in the floor plan, and to leave enough space for the Sims to get around it as they have particular routing requirements, and to accommodate the stairs which aren't shown on the official floor plan, the upper storey overhangs the deck by a small amount.  Without that pillar, there would be a hole in Elizabeth's floor.  I was tempted to stick a fireman's pole in that place instead so she had an escape route, but I just can't picture her having the courage to run away from the destiny her parents chose for her.