I have recently encountered a known bit of idiocy in this game (the nitwit responsible obviously never played the game) - you can only place a house on a lot as large or larger than the lot on which it was built. Common sense should dictate that the footprint of the house determines the size of lot required. End of soapbox.

I built a house on a 64x64 lot because I had no definite idea how large the place would be, had built and demolished a couple of prototypes and figured the actual house would be about twice as large. Turned out the house barely occupies a fourth of that lot, a 30x40 would be more than sufficient ....but I can only place it on a 64x64 (I'd like to tell the devs where to place it, but that would be illegal, immoral, and physically impossible). So I put the house in the library, bulldoze the lot, and try to place the house in the center ...but cannot. The buttons in the lower right have no effect; the screen greys, the working animation runs a few seconds, then back to the house - still sitting in a corner of the lot. The rotate buttons work but do nothing useful, the house rotates 90deg and moves to the next corner, so it is still in a corner with one wall only one tile from the edge of the lot (can't even put a row of hedges there).

So, is there any way to at least put this house in the center of the lot?

Rebuild it.

The frustrating part is that the game cares about the original lot size rather than the actual footprint of the house. It's impossible to place a lot on any size smaller than the original one. As Lucy says, you either have to rebuild it on a smaller and more convenient lot, because 64x64 is the largest lot size in the game and there is no way to center the house itself, or keep the current house and transform it into a farmhouse/rancho to fill the empty space.

I have to agree with the frustration. There have been a few houses that I saved and placed on a slightly larger lot, did some customizing, and was then only able to use the larger lot for future placement.

Well, for now at least, rebuilding is not an option; this was one of those projects where half the time was spent tearing out half the progress and redesigning because something didn't work as I planned. An ordeal I've no desire to repeat in the immediate future. So this morning I decided to add the pool and landscaping, and mutter obscenities whenever I drive past the place ...only to find I can't work on it without evicting the two sims who already moved in (though they may not be there long anyway, a man and his daughter with $15000 in the bank living in a $180,000 house).

"...or keep the current house and transform it into a farmhouse/rancho to fill the empty space"
hmmmm -





Four bedrooms, five bathrooms, patio on roof, lower level is an observation deck (has no ceiling, so is a "pit" in the main level), the pool goes beneath it ...and two residents, lol (this seems par for the course in Sims3; a tiny two bedroom house has four people living in it, a huge six bedroom estate has two). You can see it sits right at the sidewalk, the stone wall ends at that side of the lot. The original design was to span a creek slightly downstream from a waterfall, so eventually I'll have to rebuild it from scratch; was so hoping i was done with it and could just plop it down in its destination when ready.