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.)
![Image](http://www.duke.edu/~bweber/Neohome/EntryBefore.jpg)
![Image](http://www.duke.edu/~bweber/Neohome/EntryBefore1.jpg)
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:
![Image](http://www.duke.edu/~bweber/Neohome/Floor2LandingBefore.jpg)
![Image](http://www.duke.edu/~bweber/Neohome/Floor3LandingBefore.jpg)
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:
![Image](http://www.duke.edu/~bweber/Neohome/EntryAfter.jpg)
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):
![Image](http://www.duke.edu/~bweber/Neohome/WorkroomBefore.jpg)
![Image](http://www.duke.edu/~bweber/Neohome/WorkroomAfter.jpg)
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.
![Image](http://www.duke.edu/~bweber/Neohome/VarietasBalconyBefore.jpg)
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.
![Image](http://www.duke.edu/~bweber/Neohome/WorkoutBefore.jpg)
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.
![Smile :-)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
I'm still not totally satisfied so if anyone has any suggestions, LMK.
Link to my animated portal.
![Image](http://www.duke.edu/~bweber/Neohome/MyRoomBefore.jpg)
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.