Hood planning

I had a look at the website and I do not think that there is a possibility to see the different types of areas there.
I assume that you would have to look up that kind of information for each municipality separately. For the ones at which I had a look, there was no full map available. I had to look up the protocols of the building committee and if new areas were assigned, there was a picture of the planned layout in that one protocol when this topic was discussd. Thus, the information should be spread between many different protocols, many of them from decades ago with lots of not yet digitalized information.
There also is the Grundbuch, a public register for all lots in Germany that is fully digitalized, but to obtain an excerpt of that register, you have to have a legitimate interest and it costs 10 euros per excerpt (containing the information about a single lot).

If you do not plan to recreate the Sims 4 lots, that quarter will appear more authentic. If you just plan to have residential lots there, Crumbling Isle might have been a village that was incorporated into Windenburg at some point in time. Then all buildings would be older and might have a bit different styles. It also could have been an estate with a manor and servants' houses. Former subsidiary buildings like stables and barns might have been converted into expensive houses and apartments. In that case, most or all the buildings would be from a similar period in time, just with different price ranges. The converted buildings would be quite modern inside. Loft style is rather popular for this kind of converted buildings, but of course, it is not the only possible style. For the manor and the servants' buildings, you could decide on whether they are renovated and modern inside. The manor and the converted subsidiary buildings would be in the center and the servants's houses would be more remote. As the servants' houses were of lower quality than the main buildings, you also could decide that they decayed faster and that for this reason fewer or no ones are remaining.


Build/buy

You could build houses for EA. They also tend to forget the railing quite often.
While sims cannot fall and injure themselves, German building legislation still requires railings for all stairs that have more than three steps. If you want more information, you may look up DIN 18065. The regulations of this norm may be complemented by additional regulations in each municipality.

Picture 1: For that form, the most common material is plastic and such waste bins usually just have one plain color. Neutral colors are more common, but any color is possible. A metal mesh (like this https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/p...a-7DgNOYvPNrzAz) also would be possible, if it is possible to have transparent parts in the texture. There also were a few ones with wooden colors, but those wooden colors were light ones and the wood grain was barely visible. The waste bin in the picture due to its texture looks like a wood fiber plant pot somehow imho.

Picture 3: I would remove item 4. I also would remove the rug unless you have an object that fits beneath to explain the slope on the left side. Wrinkles are fine, but the sloped part looks like it ignores fundamental physical laws.
Rug 14 has a pattern that has been common for a really long time. Those type of rugs usually were rather small and available for a relatively low price in furniture shops. The pattern of rug 6 looks more like a blanket pattern to me. I am absolutely not able to tell you which rug patterns were relevant in which part of the 00s. Rug 13 looks stripy enough to get a similar judgement as rug 14, although it would have been less common than rug 14 due to size, colors and the flowers between the stripes.
My general experience: More expensive/expensive-looking furniture often was combined with Persian/Persian-looking rugs (dark wood mostly combined with dark and red rug colors, light wood mostly combined with light and blue or cream rug colors), mainly owned by older and middle-aged people. IKEA rugs mainly were combined with IKEA furniture and were mainly owned by younger and middle-aged people, usually people who had moved out and established their own household. The striped rugs often were used in situations when you needed a robust rug, like on a balcony, as a blanket for pets, in children's bedrooms next to their beds etc. Some people also had a big rug in a plain color in their living room for couches, armchairs and coffee table that covered most of the floor.

Picture 4: As item 9 does not really look like a book, I woul remove it.


Windenburg builds

BaWü Fachwerk apartment
Do you have a link with the pictures for me once more? I had a look at the last couple of postings, but I could not find it.
Regarding the households I had suggested: Is any of these households living on government assistance? If yes, the apartment should not be bigger than suggested because in that case there are limits for the maximum allowed apartment size and if the apartment is too big, people will have to move to a smaller apartment. In cases, where it is not possible to find a smaller apartment, authorities have the right (and sometimes really do this) to lock rooms of the too big apartment so that the tenants just may use the amount of space that is considered appropriate for their household size.


New builds

Kirchstraße FWH
Shop ideas: Wrist watches often also are sold in jewellery shops. As the shop is rather small, that would be a good choice imho. Alternatively, clocks also could be sold with furniture or electronics or maybe even robots.
Stairs: You could use regular modular stairs instead. Six tiles is enough space for that and you could place the second set of stairs directly on top of the first set, if you use modular ones.
Apartment size: I am quite sure that the attic room does not count as "Wohnfläche" (living space) for calculating the rent when the room can only be accessed via Luke and ladder. Therefore, there would be no incentive for the landlord to include the attic room into a rental contract. If you want to include the room into the apartment, you should add stairs. (If regular non-modular stairs are stockable, that might be an option to access the attic.)
Household: In RL, rental apartments of such a size are not that common. More apartments of that size are owned apartments. Unfortunately, owned apartments are not possible ingame. If you exclude the attic, the apartment might be an option for a family with three children. Both parents would have to have jobs to be able to afford the rent although they do not necessarily have to be academics. Including the attic, I think that the apartment would be too expensive for a nuclear family. Maybe it could be suited for a three-generational family (although those more often live in owned houses in rural areas) or as a shared apartment for some younger or middle-aged friends. If you want to add a special household to the neighborhood, the apartment also could be used for supervised living for teenagers who had been removed from their families due to neglect (or other problems) or adults with mental handicaps.
Wall column: On the ground floor and in the attic, there is a wall column, but there is no corresponding column in the other two floors. The column most likely contains the chimney. Therefore, it should be on all floors.
Reference pictures: This attic definitely is not living space. I would not include it in the apartment. A decorative Luke without real access should be sufficient.

Bonn apartment
Felege family: What are the apartment sizes? As the family despends on state support, the size limits depending on the number of household members are relatively strict. The style of the house is fitting for a household that moved to the village/town relatively recently.
Waste bin(s): As I am not sure whether you used the plural because of the different types of bins or because you think that each household has its own set of bins: In apartment buildings, waste bins are shared and people try to keep the number of waste bins (at least the black ones) as low as possible so that they do not have to pay unneccessary money to the waste collection company. For four households, one black bin might work (unless diaper-aged children are living there). There also should be just one blue bin. There might be one or two yellow bins. I am not sure whether the apartment building should have a brown bin (organic waste) at all. The more people share a bin, the more likely one of them throws stuff into the bin which may not be disposed there. Most municipalities check the content of the bins every now and then and if they discover wrong stuff in the bin, the household receives a warning first and after a few incidents, they lose the right to have a brown bin (which usually does not cost money) and have to use the black bin (that costs money) instead. If the one black bin already is relatively full whenever it is collected, they might need a second black bin and therefore have to pay the double amount for the waste collection. (Sorry for the side note.) Back to the original question: If there is no connection from the back to the front of the house, the bins have to be placed in front of the house. Otherwise the tenants of the upper floors could not reach it and it would be disgusting for the tenants of the ground floor to move the bins through their apartments. The bins, of course, have to be placed on the lot itself and not on the sidewalk (except for the day when the waste is collected).
Front view reference & map: The walls of the house are not exactly parallel to the street. Therefore, on the left side of the house (in the front view picture), there is a small strip of land in front of the house (beneath the balcony) that belongs to the lot. I assume that the waste bins always are placed where they are placed in this picture. Ingame, you will always have at least one tile between sidewalk and the outer wall. That tile is where I would place the bins. (And as you can see in the picture preferably not directly beneath the window.)
Original layouts: The two ground floor apartments are too small for the Felege family and the two apartments on the upper floors should be too big.

Multi-gen FWH Markstraße
Behr household: I am sorry, but I am not able to remember all your households and it is quite time-consuming to go through all the links from the last couple of postings to find the right information. It would be great, if you could give me a short summary of the family (number of sims, ages, income and special attributes like pets).
Side view: Can you replace the windows with smaller ones?
Hauswirtschaftszimmer: Usually, it is just a laundry room. Housekeeping area seems to be a common translation.
Jewellery shop: If you know the company name, you could look it up in the Handelsregister (commercial register). If you use the official website, this information is available for free.
Rear view: Maybe a ladder as connection between the two balconies would work better than the spiral stairs?
Front & back door: I am sure that this could be changed if the owners want to. I guess the current owners just got so used to using the back door while there still was a shop in the front area that they did not change their habits after the shop closed.
Lot price: 175k is extremely cheap for a house with 325 m² living space. I searched for houses in my home region with a 100 km radius and the biggest house that I could find was a FWH with about 200 m² in a town of 4000 inhabitants. For more modern houses, about 160 m² was the maximum. Therefore, your reference house most likely needs a lot of money and renovations to provide an acceptable quality of living. Ingame, however, this low quality of living cannot really be realized. Therefore, the owners should be rather wealthy. If you think that the current owners did all the renovations, they should have a high income. If you think that the parents of the current owners already made bigger investments, a slightly above average income might be enough.

WHG Am Markt
Ground floor layout: Can you connect the room with the back entrance and the room with the stairs? It does not really make sense to have two walls and doors to reach the stairs. And as you already know, spiral stairs are not really an option for apartment buildings as they do not qualify as fire escape.
Shop layout: The whole front of the building should accessible to the customers. That way more products can be displayed in the windows and daylight is also nice to have. Maybe turn the right part of the building into a storage room, but make it smaller (so that the front of the room is added to the main shop room). If the shop is really successful, they might need additional storage room, but that additional storage also could be somewhere else where the rents are cheaper.
Business idea: I think guitars (or musical instruments in general) without the other stuff would be more than sufficient for that small shop. You might want to look up "Musikhaus Thomann". That is a German music shop located in a small village of about 200 inhabitants that apparently is has the highest sales numbers for a music shop worldwide (including their online business, of course).
OG: Please also replace the ladder with regular stairs - no matter what kind of changes you have to do to the layout, it will be worth it.
Household: As the apartment has two bedrooms and two more rooms that could be converted to additional bedrooms, it would be suited for a family. As it is rather small, it would be affordable for a family with a lower income. How many family members does the Felege family have? The size would be considered as suitable for five or more household members in RLP.


Culture

In my last posting, I just tried to list certain trends because it is difficult to pick a certain sim and say that this sim would have racist opinions. This does not mean that there racism, stereotypes and prejudices only exist in certain places. They exist everywhere, they just are more or less common. As an example: Far-right party AfD currently has 29-31 % in polls in Thüringen (where there will be elections on municipal level soon). In Germany as a whole, they have 16-19 % in polls (which still is far too much imho).
I do not use instagram, but if you can forward the text/images to me, I could translate a few of them for you.
The Youtuber that I mentioned is @ryanwass. I only have watched one video from him because it was linked somehwere and had a look at the titles of several other videos. Content about Bavaria definitely seems to be overrepresented, but matches American stereotypes about Germany. Nevertheless, there also are videos where he reacts to videos about working conditions, the university system, German fraternities, differences between German and American houses etc. that could contain new information for you.


Fashion

That definitely is possible. I guess that it also might be related to the different number of inhabitants of our countries. Germany with more than 80 million people is a bigger market for local film and TV productions, local music etc. Of course, we also are strongly influenced by the U.S., but maybe a bit less than other countries. I also assume that there are differences within Germany. In cities, people pick up trends quicker than in rural areas.
Brands: I think that this also depended a lot on the environment. In Gymnasium, it played a smaller role than in Hauptschule. And in a very rural area like my home area, where the Gymnasium pupils had very mixed backgrounds (from children of company owners to children of unemployed parents) it probably mattered even less.
Discount stores also were not yet that common. Kik was founded in 1994, but it took them many years before they opened a shop in my hometown. Therefore, you would have to own a car and be able afford fuel for a one hour drive to be able to go to a discount clothing shop.
Discount supermarkets like Aldi every now and then had some clothes as special offers, but without visible brands on them and you would not buy whole outfits there. There were shops with affordable clothes like C&A (although you also could get ball gowns for several hundred euros there) where you could get cheap basics and then mix them with more special items from other shops. There also were some regional chain stores that were quite popular and affordable.
Really poor people would rather go to a second-hand shop in our municipality instead of buying new stuff. I do not have any experience with that, but it would make sense if you can buy the same brands there, just from previous collections/years.
Extremely sandblasted jeans are nothing that I would necessarily associate with a cheap price. Basic items from cheap stores often were less remarkable than similar items from more popular stores. Therefore, people with that cheap clothing would not necessarily stick out and draw attention to their clothing. Therefore, I would assume that some of the "approved brands" started the trend first and the cheap stores only joined in later. Of course, there also was cheap fast fashion with low quality available in cheap stores, but you could avoid that stuff easily.

If you want to call it like that @Obelix look. Usually, these men wear cloth trousers and buttoned shirts, often with suspenders.

Middle-aged and elder women: For a middle-aged women, I would choose a simple, not fashionable pair of jeans, for the elder women rather cloth trousers. Depending on the season, they both could wear a wide cut t-shirt or pullover with plain color or unfashionable pattern. For elder women, I also recommend a Kittelschürze with skin colored tights and a t-shirt or pullover beneath: https://static.bnn.de/nachrichten/d...0056693758h.jpg This kind of clothing was considered fashionable for a short period of time when they were young and some women continued wearing Kittelschürzen for the rest of their lives.
If the temperature is a bit cooler, they also could wear an old, clunky cardigan on top pf t-shirt/pullover.
Shoes like these (also as sandal version with heel strap) also were quite common and often used inside the house, in the garden, but also for trips to the nearby town. https://schuherlebnis.de/media/imag..._200x200@2x.jpg
For other types of shoes, you also can look up pictures of nuns (search terms e.g. Nonne Schuhe). In RL, I have also seen some nuns with outerwear that might be what you are looking for, but unfortunately, it seems more or less impossible to find pictures online because there are so many pictures of nun costumes.
I am sorry that I did not include more links. So many fashion shops have pictures of all their products online so that it is difficult to find unfashionable examples for pretty much all search terms.

My Germany trip!!! :D
So last month, my partner and I finally have visited the hamlet of interest in the Bergisches Land for my Veronaville inspiration because it isn't too far driving from Cologne, where my SO and I stayed for a party, and we got lucky with that rare moment of really warm weather last April! Aside of visiting those villages for my TS2 build research, we really enjoyed hiking in its tranquil forests and walking through the cozy and quiet non-touristic villages . My partner also liked those cutesy half-timbered houses (FWH). Indeed, that specific hamlet I had on the radar for a long time has the vibes of German Veronaville irl regarding the "Bauweise" and the population size (~500 inhabitants), except that it doesn't have a wide creek (it's located higher up in the hills). Most of the (monumental) FWH in that hamlet are detached civil houses with big yards and most of them are built between 18th to early 20th century, though I've also seen a post-war FWH at the main street of a 3k village further down at the river. I kept the details in mind you posted in reply no.11 ( https://modthesims.info/showthread....738#post5737738 ), where you mentioned that (spaciously) detached FWH are exceptional, but I think that the open building style was more common in certain areas of the Bergisches Land. After asking around about the architectural history in the local FB groups, I understood that the hamlets in the area we visited used to be very small settlements with enough space to build detached civil houses (Bürgerhäuser), and the reason for those big yards was to farm their own vegetation and small livestock, as the inhabitants had other occupations than agriculture, such as working in metal factories or as an artisan (metal mining/industry was only replaced by agriculture from early 20th century). So I observed that most of the FWH over there are not built as U-shaped or rectangular-shaped Bauernhäuser. And some of those civil FWH have bigger front yards than 3 tiles wide. Instead, the farms were built as Einzelhöfer outside of the villages (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einzelsiedlung ). However, even the 3k village/small town at the river, built as a Straßedorf with a church, also has a fair amount of detached civil FWH, especially at the outskirts. The longest attached build is 5 houses in a row in the center, while most of the other attached builds are duplexes and a few triplexes. Farming was not convenient in that valley because the hills are steep and swampy, hence the lack of Bauernhöfer there as well. I also noticed that some the FWH have fancy extensions, such as garages and balconies. I guess such kinds of extensions are possible there as its plots are spacious enough, although I wonder whether or not they were listed as monuments.
The builds I also observed in the hamlets I visited higher up in the hills, are a couple of MFH apartments and a few old Fachwerk duplex houses. The higher amount of MFHs in such a hamlet is because it was formerly a settlement for factory workers. But I assume that old big houses in villages, such as large Bürgerhäuser and pension houses, can also be converted into MFH. But in more rural and agricultural-oriented villages, I can imagine that bigger MFH are less common. Another inspiration I got during my hike is converting the silo into a lookout tower on the hills because we visited such a monument and we saw a few empty bottles of booze inside .
While you mentioned that many Germans cover their windows with sheer curtains, I was surprised that a fair amount of inhabitants do not cover their windows in the Veronaville-ish hamlet. But it must be noted that the windows in German houses are smaller than those in Dutch houses. You also mentioned that Jägerzäune are not common, but I observed they are fairly common in the villages I visited. Could be a regional thing, though (NRW vs RLP or Hessen).
So I conclude that the villages in the Bergisches Land with its Bergisches Häuser are the best references for my German twist on the Veronaville Lots . And apparently, the Bergs also have their own word for a hamlet/Weiler: http://www.wilmanns.com/wippe/hofschaftsdef.htm (+ topographical image: http://www.wilmanns.com/solingen/solingenrelief.jpg ). I am aware, though, that the smaller villages in NRW may be less rural than those in RLP and Hessen.
My partner and I definitely want to visit the nature of NRW again because we both enjoy hiking in quiet hilly forests with rivers/creeks and walking through villages with cute half-timbered houses! Also, it is not too far driving for me (3+ hours) and I found out I got a nice rush from driving on the Autobahn (yes, I'm aware of the laws around the advised 130 km/h limit and getting blinked by zoom-zoomies if I hog the left lane too long).

Builds & Hoods updates
So inspired by my trip in Germany, I shifted my focus from Windenburg builds to giving the original Via Veronaville Lots makeovers because I want to draw those houses for a panel in my TS2 comic.
For Windenburg, I don't use the Bergisches Land as inspiration, as the original Windenburg backdrop buildings consist of those tall multi-OG old houses, which is less common in the towns of Bergisches Land. For this subhood instead, I rather get my inspiration from cutesy old towns like Monschau (NRW), Adenau (RLP), and various towns in Hessen. Occasionaly, I browse on eBay Kleinanzeigen for ads of old/half-timbered WGH apartments with the hope to find good floorplans. I imagine that the Windslar area is another hamlet-y Ortsteil of Windenburg, but located higher up in the hills.

Update Baumann household (link: https://imgur.com/Q0FR8MJ )
I've rearranged the Baumann family and its relatives in Obsidian (link: https://imgur.com/a/5x2xcEH ). So Nikolas now has only one sister, and his Male relatives are cousins. Which household is most likely to stay with their widowed mom in her multigen house, Nikolas or Margret? I was thinking of Margret because Nikolas may have had more desire to move out because of his Romance Aspiration.

Buid updates
My apologies for the confusion. I will repost my image links to builds and households if I discuss them from now on for more clarity.

Here's my BaWü Fachwerk apartment build: https://imgur.com/a/64O4Mnp . I haven't made up yet which households rely on government benefits, aside of Felege.

Bonn apartment ( https://imgur.com/a/AocV9DR ): OG1 and OG2 are 111 m2 each. Felege is a 6-Sim refugee household (4 kids, but no pets): https://imgur.com/HCghB55

Multi-gen FWH ( https://imgur.com/a/9ZH0I0Z ): here's the link to the Behr household (6 Sims, 2 cats): https://imgur.com/ZoJ2F7m

I am glad that you enjoyed your vacation.

I am not sure if I have ever been to Bergisches Land (except for the cities there, of course). I have more knowledge about the Eifel and some other places that you also use as inspiration. And there always can be exceptions to what is common as Germany is so diverse (hundreds of sovereign, mostly small countries in the past, religiously divided, landscapes from coastal to alpine), lots of influence by and migration from other countries).

A village or hamlet without full-time farmers is rather untypical. Big yards are typical, even for farmers, because it is more convenient. In places with limited road access, they usually just have a different shape (behind the house, rather narrow and very long).

I am not sure whether I understood the part about metal factories correctly. People used to work in the factories first and then switched to agriculture? If that is correct, the question is what these people did before there were factories as I assume that quite a few buildings of this place were built before the beginning of the industrialization and such a remote location also might not be the best place for people commuting to work (at a time when they had to walk to work). It is possible that mining and metal working already were the main profession before the beginning of the industrialization. In that case, people rather worked in small manufactures aand workshops in their village/hamlet. That even might be an explanation for the detached way of building: If one building catched fire while working, it would not spread through the whole village/hamlet. But without more information, that is just speculation.

I am not sure whether a town with 3000 inhabitants still can be a Straßendorf. It has to have quite a few smaller roads in addition to the main road to offer enough space for all the houses. You might be right about thee balconies as they also are common in the alpine regions for big houses that have quite a bit of distance to the neighbouring houses. It might also be related to the weather. Rain mostly occurs on one side of a mountain, but not on the other sides. If you live on the wetter side of the mountain, it is quite convenient if you have some outdoor space that is covered from rain, e.g. for drying clothes.

It definitely is common that the amount of detached houses in the outskirts of a village/town is bigger than in the center. If you already have a long way to the village center, it does not matter that much if it is even a bit longer. And in the outskirts, you have more houses that were built at a later date when people cared more about having some distance from their neighbors.

I have no explanation why some of these houses did not have curtains. The Jägerzäune might be a regional thing or also due to the landscape of the villages and towns that you visited as those fences can be built rather easily, while some other fences require small foundations in the ground for the fence posts. Jägerzäune also exist in my home region, but there they are mostly common as fences for weekend cottages (without electricity and running water) at the edge of the forest, not for regular houses.

You might want to research if the big wave of Polish immigrants in the second half of the 19th century only settled in the Ruhrgebiet or whether they also settled in Bergisches Land. Many of them came to work in the metal industry and of course also influenced their new home area.

The 130 km/h advise is only relevant if you are involved in an accident as it will have an effect on which insurance has to pay which part of the damages. You only should use the left lane while you overtake another vehicle, otherwise you have to drive on the right lane. If there is a middle lane, you may remain on that lane if there are slower vehicles on the right lane every now and then. As long as you are overtaking another vehicle, you can ignore the blinking cars behind you. You have as much right to overtake as they do.



Baumann household
Do I understand the new relationships correctly? Nikolas seems to be single now and his previous wife now is connected to one of his cousins? If yes, I think that it is more likely that he still lives with his mom. Children with a family of their own are more likely to move out than children who are single and women in average move out at a younger age than men. Therefore, it is plausible that Margret moved out first and Nikolas then simply stayed. However, such decisions are highly individual depending on the relationships between all the people involved, income/wealth of each involved party, the spouse's parental home, location of the house, workplace, school etc. and many more things. Therefore, both choices are plausible as long as you have the right backstory.
The aspiration does not have to be a problem as the mother might not even notice the different women (depending on the house layout or if her son prefers to stay the night at the women's places) or might not care and many sons enjoy it when their mothers still cook and do the laundry for them.
Just for the record: Margret is a rather uncommon version of that name. Margarete, Margarethe, Margareta and Margaretha (ordered according to frequency) all are more common versions.



BaWü Fachwerk apartment
Kent Kappe: While the size would be okay for him, I would expect him to live in a more presentable place - one where he does not have to use the back entrance (due to the shop), one that has a balcony, roof terrace or something like that, one, where he has an individual parking or garage (difficult with the apartment life game mechanics and the style of the neighborhood) and one that has a wider staircase and most likely also an elevator. Moreover: What kind of job does he have? If he works in a science-related job (according to his skills) or in the Capp family business, his workplace might not be located in the town center and the daily commute might not be too enjoyable.
As long as households do not receive government benefits for their housing, a 90 m² apartment should be fine for any household for which I suggested 80-85 m².



Bonn apartment
The apartment in OG2 (or an apartment of identical size in OG1) would work for them, if they moved in very recently. For six people, the maximum apartment size with state benefits is 120 m². Babies are not taken into consideration for this limit and for five people, the maximum size is 105 m².
In RL, they most likely would live in a smaller apartment because the demand for apartments is higher than the supply and landlords can choose their tenants. People with migration background often directly are rejected and being unemployed and most likely with a mediocre Schufa (credit investigation company) score does not improve the situation either. Therefore, in RL, they would have moved into a smaller apartment when the family still had fewer members and then would have tried to find a bigger apartment after the births without success. If your famly has any more children during the course of play, therefore, I would have them continue to live in the 111 m² apartment.



Multi-gen FWH
The house definitely is big enough for the family. If it already has been family-owned for a longer period of time, it also should be possible financially.
If you want to keep the two kitchens, it would be quite common that the elders live on the ground floor while the younger family lives upstairs. You might want to do some small layout adjustments to make this work better. There should be a full bath on the ground floor and the office and mini hallway maybe can be turned into something more useful. The room with the question mark maybe can be connected to the big hallway.

Bergisches Land
My focus has now shifted to this area, in particular Oberbergisches Land, though I still want to use the Ahr villages as reference for hood road layout ideas. Cologne is the most nearby big city (~30 mins driving) of Oberbergisches Kreis. I looked up the addresses of the FWH with extensive Anbau (= annex/extension?) in the 3k village, and it turns out they are not listed as monuments. Therefore, I assume the owners more freedom to extend their houses with balconies/garage etc. than the owners of listed monuments. Some monumental FWH do have some Anbau, but that's becase they were only listed as monuments in the late 80s or later, so I assume it was more easy to extend houses before they were protected. And I understood the rules regarding the extent of extension/Anbau and renovations on a monument is highly dependant of the regional monumental protection laws. Most of the monumental detached FWH in that hamlet village higher up the hills do not have any subsidiary buildings. Those detached buildings were probably mainly built in 18th - 19th century and they indeed had big gardens for their own produce. I understood it was a poor village with lack of nearby industry and the soil yielded poor harvest, hence the FWH were not replaced by solid houses. The Jägerzäune type of fences are actually common at regular Bürgerhäuser in that area.

Meanwhile, I've gathered a lot of monument inspiration for giving the Via Veronaville Lots makeovers while keeping some of its architectural details the same (solid walls at EG, Zwerchgiebel). I just started with those makeovers, so I'm not ready yet to screenshot them.

Eifel
For comparison, do you know why the houses were mostly built as Bauernhöfer instead of Bürgerhäuser? Was the soil structure not too swampy to build agricultural fields on the hills? And do you have insight on why the farms were not built as Einzelhöfer in the outskirts of the village centers, unlike in certain Weilern of the Bergisches Land?

Baumann household
Obsidian album: https://imgur.com/a/5x2xcEH
updated Obsidian tree overview: https://imgur.com/nSV1iUv
No, Nikolas is still paired his Yugoslavic wife Danijela. Then I might go for the scenario he has his own small living place (3 or 4-room MFH or a small EFH). He works at a DIY/handicraft shop, but Danijela only has side jobs at restaurants. Given this financial situation, would they have to rely on government benefits and thus live in a smaller apartment size than 90 m2?

Felege
Family bio: https://imgur.com/HCghB55
I imagine their Toddler is born in the early 2000s + their Children during mid 90s, and that they have moved to Germany during the first half of the 90s (depending on when the East-African refugee wave was happening). The Teen Markus was a Baby or a Toddler when they immigrated, so the household initially consisted of 3 or 4 Sims. What maximum living space size would probably fit them in this case?

Capp/Kappe & Monty headcanons
I recall you've assumed that Consort would be a strict Sim and only lets his grandkids spend time with their friends on weekends in the afternoon. Do you imagine he wants them to come back home for dinner, or are they allowed to have dinner at their friend's place? Are they even allowed to have sleepovers at home or at their friends? However, would Consort be less strict towards Tybalt? After all, in the Dutch translation of TS2, Hermia's bio states that she wonders why "her brother Tiberius is actually allowed to run loose", even though her bio of the original English version is: "She often wonders what rock her brother Tybalt crawled out from under."

And if there's an annual village event (e.g. Schützenfest), would the Capps rather go on a trip out of town during such events to avoid interactions with the Montys?
(I wonder this because general German social customs might differ from general Dutch social customs regarding certain details)

Would it be doable for Romeo and Juliette to hang out somewhere in the forest at the outskirts of Veronaville, or would they be caught too easily by hikers and dog walkers?
(I always have lived in the same big Mittelstadt surrounded by Kleinstädte, and my partner also lives in a Kleinstadt, so I'm not known with typical social situations and customs in smaller town sizes, such as a Kleindorf of ~500 inhabitants in this case)

If Romeo invites his friends at his place, how likely would Ü16 Mercutio join briefly, even though he's older than U16 Romeo + his U16 friends, and how likely would the U16 friends drink beer at the Monty home if the grandparents aren't too strict?

During the workweek, how common was it for teenagers to hang out with friends from the same village after having done homework + dinner? (both in spring and fall/winter)

Tellier household
Family bio: https://imgur.com/vdJ4W5h
Build pics with questions about rooms included: https://imgur.com/a/4R1vYbW .
Obsidian notes about individual Sims: https://imgur.com/a/F9HFQdF
Since both parents have low interest in Environment but moderate to high interest in Weather, how would their garden look like regarding flowers and shrubs that need maintenance? I imagine Margarete would have her own kitchen garden in the backyard due to her high interest in Food and eventually having side jobs at the Italian restaurant run by the Montys.
Since I want to create a cat for them, in which rooms would they be allowed to sleep indoors, given that Margarete is a Neat Sim? And in which room would they most likely place the litter box? What kind of backyard fences are common to let the cat roam around in their spacious backyard, but not at the street side due to living at the main road?

Bergisches Land

Yes, an Anbau is an annex/extension.
As long as the buildings were not yet protected, the owners had the right to do any kind of modification that was in accordance with the then valid building regulations. At very early times, it might even be possible that no regulations were in place at all.
There are 16 monument protection laws, one for each German state. Thus, there should not be too big differences within one state. However, house owners have to do requests for every single change they plan (at least that's what the relatives and friends who live in protected houses always told me when they planned renovations) and with so many case-by-case decisions, it is inevitable that there are differences in interpretation of the laws, sometimes even depending on which person within a municipal authority handles the request. Some decisions really are incomprehensible. Here is a short video (3 minutes) about such an example in Hamburg: https://www.google.de/url?sa=t&sour...mcSZA3qPouLuzTG Auto-translation of captions is available.
Just for the record: There is no real need to "replace" a FWH with a different type of house. When FWHs were wellbuilt and are well taken of, they can endure for centuries. There still exist about 20 FWHs from the 13th century in Germany, for example. There usually had to be some kind of reason to replace a house, e.g. after a fire, destruction due to war, decay because the house was not built well enough etc. A few decades after WW2 (when the housing shortage was not that big any more), central heating systems also became an incentive for replacing a house, but at that time, it is quite likely that houses already were protected by the monument preservation authority.


Bürgerhaus

The use of this term for houses in a village is a bit confusing for me. In the past, the term Bürger did not refer to every German person. To become a Bürger, you had to fulfill certain criteria and when you became a Bürger, you were granted certain rights. I do not want to go into detail too much, but for many centuries, that term was exclusively used for (a small part of the) people who lived in a town, not for people who lived in a village. And a Bürgerhaus was the (often attached/row) house of such a Bürger that was built within the town wall and on a lot that belongs to said Bürger. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCrgerhaus Only in 1919, when the Weimar constitution came into effect, all Germans became Bürger.
That is why I wonder that the term Bürgerhaus is used for houses that are not in a town and that are detached houses. Did the people to whom you talked maybe use the term incorrectly? Is the village maybe not a village but a town? Did people use another term for these houses before 1919 and only change it afterwards? I am not sure whether it is possible to find the reason for the (wrong?) use of this term, but the knowledge definitely could help you to understand a bit more why and how this village is special.


Eifel

The term Bauernhof refers to the whole farm including stables, barns etc. Typical layouts of farm buildings vary between different regions due to aspects like climate, soil types, but also inheritance laws. The layouts had proven to be the most practical ones for farming over the centuries (with small alterations every now and then).
A Bürgerhaus in contrast does not offer space for livestock and harvested products (except maybe on small level for self-supply). Instead, on the ground floor they had a big room that was either used as shop (for traders) or as a workshop (for craftsmen). So why should a farmer choose a house layout that is not/barely suited for his profession and lifestyle?
Soil on hills should not be swampy as the water should flow downhill. When mountains are high enough, clouds might not be able to get past it so that on one side of the mountain there is too much rain for agriculture, like in some places in the Alps. Nevertheless, livestock breeding still is possible in these places. And I do not think that the Eifel hills are big enough to cause such an effect in large, contiguous areas.
I am not sure why the farms were not built as Einzelhöfe, but I have the impression that a denser construction style simply was preferred. When a local ruler founded a new settlement, he usually wanted the settlement to become big and relevant and eventually to gain town rights. If all the buildings are built with a big distance to each other, that will not be possible. Also: How can a village center develop if nobody wants to build a house/farm there? A more densely built-up area also increases the chances that the inhabitants can protect each other in case of attacks/wars because they can see what is going on. Moreover, even villages usually had some kind of fortified building (often the church). In war times, all the inhabitants could go there and be safe(r) there. If the graveyard also was fortified, they were able to bring along their cattle which would make it easier to rebuild their homes after the destruction. Of course, this only works, if you live close enough to said fortified building/area to make it there in time.
Another relevant aspect could be the inheritance laws in that region. Einzelhöfe only make sense when the land around the farm belongs to you. That is only guaranteed in regions where the oldest son inherits everything. In regions where all sons or all children inherit/receive as dowry something, after a few generations, hardly any part of the land around the farm still would belong to that farm.
Relatively new Einzelhöfe also might be a result of the Flurbereinigung in the 70s. In many places, strips of land had become so narrow due to inheritance distribution that it often was impossible to use modern machines and vehicles for agriculture. That is why the land was redistributed to create bigger fields. The fields closer to the village were more attractive to the farmers and everybody wanted to have those while hardly anybody wanted to have fields further away from the village. That is why in some places, many fields further away from the village were bundled and the farmer who would take that land was allowed to build a farm on that land (plus maybe also some kind of financial compensation) so that they would have a much closer distance to their fields than the farmers who remained in the village.


Baumann household

As it would be too time-consuming to research realistic incomes and limits for benefits from 20 years ago, I used today's numbers instead. With their income, they definitely would not be entitled to receive ALG2. They might be just within the income limits for Wohngeld or slightly above it (and therefore not entitled to any benefits), but Wohngeld afaik does not have any requirements related to apartment size so that you do not have any strict limits for the apartment size. Nevertheless, you should not pick a too big rented apartment/house as they probably could not afford this.
However, it does not necessarily have to be a rented home. He could have inherited a house from his grandparents. In that event, he would have to pay off the shares of the other heirs, but houses in rural areas (especially old and barely renovated ones) are not that expensive so that credit instalments should be afordable (especially if Danijela had a better job before they had children) and the credit would be paid off after several years while rent payments would be there forever.
One comment regarding the side jobs: Mini jobs only were introduced in 2003. Before, even side jobs had full taxes and duties which made side jobs the same as a regular part-time job. As the children were born way before 2003, you might want to consider this for your backstory.


Felege

In NRW, the apartment/house size limits are 80 m², 95 m², 110 m² and 125 m² for 3, 4, 5 and 6 inhabitants respectively.
In RLP, the apartment/house size limits are 80 m², 90 m², 105 m² and 120 m² for 3, 4, 5 and 6 inhabitants respectively.
Children young enough to still sleep in their parents' bedroom are not yet considered an inhabitant.
Their real apartmentsize will depend on when they last moved to another apartment/house. Housing shortage should be a less problem in rural areas than in cities, but still might be a problem in non-ex-GDR states. Prejudices and racism might be a bigger problem in rural areas than in cities. Nevertheless, it also depends on luck whether/when you find a new apartment. Thus, you can choose more or less any date that you want as long as you choose the right backstory for it.


Capp & Monty headcanons

Dinner:
I guess that would depend on who the friend and the friend's family is. When a connection to that family would be useful in Consort's opinion, he would be supportive, otherwise not so much.

Tybalt:
It would be possible, but not a must. Many people still have traditional role models, parents also are more worried that their daughters might be assaulted than their sons and if you follow the matrimonial tradition of the Capp family, only the girls would be needed to continue the family while Tybalt would be considered part of his spouse's family upon marriage.

Village event:
I do not think that the Capp family would be out of town just to avoid contact with the Montys. They consider Veronaville their village and would not leave the field to the Montys. I also imagine that their relationship to the village is of great importance to them. Therefore, they would be at least paying/non-active members of all clubs and be on the board of some of the clubs to have some influence. Therefore, they might also have an important role in some of the village events. Some Capps also might be in the parish council and/or involved in municipal politics for additional influence.
In contrast, I am not sure whether the Montys would attend. I am not sure whether they would reciprocate the Capps' hostility. Nevertheless, I do not imagine that Patrizio and Isabella were really involved in clubs. Due to owning the family restaurant, many family members also would work during the event. And the family might not be too happy that their sales will drop during the event because the club that is organizing the event will take care of the catering (usually barbecue and some other dishes for lunch and dinner, cake and coffee in the afternoon) themselves because that is how they raise money for the club treasury. I could imagine the youngest Monty generation to attend the village events if the event is not too boring and if their friends attend as well and if it does not conflict with the working hours of the teenagers.

Hanging out in the forest:
There always will be some risk of being caught, but depending on the exact location it might not be too big. The downside is that when somebody sees you, the person most likely will immediately recognize you. However, there is not necessarily a guarantee that the people will talk about it. A friend of mine was caught smoking at the age of twelve. The elderly lady who caught her threatened to inform her parents, but never did it.
I think that the risk would be bigger that some of Romeo and Juliet's friend might accidentially mention the relationship in presence of somebody who should not know about it and start gossip that way. Nevertheless, I think that it might be difficult for Romeo und Juliet to meet regularly that way as I assume that Consort will ask his grandchildren where they want to go whenever they want to leave the house (at least whenever Consort is at home at the right time and knows about it).
Being in the outdoors also might leave some marks on shoes, clothing and bike, especially after rain or snow. Moreover, wild boars and foxes should exist in pretty much all of Germany and wolves at least existed in some regions (although mostly in ex-GDR regions back at that time).

Romeo and Mercutio:
As there are just a few children per school year in a village, age is not that relevant for finding friends and 2-3 years age difference is not that uncommon. If Romeo and Mercutio go along well, I even could imagine them having a common group of friends within the village.
I do not think that the grandparents would mind unless anybody becomes noticeably drunken in the grandparents' presence. If I remember correctly, Italy is one of the countries where it used to be common to drink wine along with meals and where children also are served a small glass of wine (often mixed with water).
It also is likely that the grandparents do not know the exact ages of Romeo's friends and therefore might even not be aware that they are younger than 16. And as the teenagers usually will be in another room than the grandparents, they might not even notice the beer. Some of the non-strict parents of my friends even bought alcohol for their children on special ocasions (e.g. birthday parties). The amount was limited so that nobody could get drunk, but it still was illegal to give e.g. liquor to 16 year-old teenagers.

Hanging out during workweek:
That definitely happened, but the frequency depended very much on the individual person. From daily to less than once per week, I have seen everything. Not everybody did homework before meeting their friends (some even did not do homework at all). Hanging out in the afternoon was more common than hanging out after dinner, at least for the younger teenagers. From the age of 16 on (or a bit earlier for those who looked a bit older), bars and clubs also became an option and meeting friends from other villages/towns was easier because chances were high that at least one person of the group of friends already was 18 and had a driving license. Happy hours and non-mainstream music often were only available on weekdays and going there until midnight was (and still is) completely legal. If you wanted to stay longer, you needed a friend who was older than 18 and your parents had to sign a document (or you had to fake that document and signature convincingly) that they allowed you to stay out after midnight under the supervision of that friend.


Tellier household

Interests:
I am not sure whether the environment and weather interests necessarily have to affect the garden. The low environment interest also could mean that they do not care about sustainability. Maybe they only use the black waste bin because they are too lazy to sort the garbage, maybe they do not care about wasting water (using bath tubs instead of showers, having a pool in the garden - even if it is just a mobile overground one, using sprinklers for their plants all the time) etc. Interest in weather can mean that they care about the scientific part and watch the forecast on TV, use that weather-specific object and maybe you find a water meter as CC. Growing produce due to high food interest sounds plausible to me. Shrubs might also be okay as they survive even if the sims do not take care of them. Flowers would die rather quickly so that they might not be the best option.

Cat:
Do you really expect the cat to stay where its owners might want it to stay? That is not how things work with cats.
Bathrooms and hallways are common places for litter boxes. If it is in the bathroom, the other family members may not block that room too often/long.
I do not know a single backyard where a cat could not escape. Regular fences usually may be up to 1.2 meters high, sight protection fences (if permitted) up to about 1.8 meters. Exact heights vary depending on state and municipality. Cats in average can jump 1.5 to 2 meters high. Thus, many cats will be able to jump even on a sight protection fence without help and cats who cannot jump as high will surely find some kind of object lying around in the garden that is close enough to the fence to jump from that object. Moreover, it is rather uncommon to have a fence around the whole lot. In states with Einfriedungspflicht (vast majority of states including RLP and NRW), lot owners have to build a fence on the right side of their lot while on the left side, there already is a fence by their neighbor (because it is the right side of the neighbor's lot). Such a fence has to be built in 50 cm distance to the lot border which means that on the left side of the lot there will be a gap at the front and back unless you decide to have two fences next to each other.


Vaulted cellars

Recently, I read that in a (undefined) region of Germany it is common to have brick floors in vaulted cellars as the bricks help to regulate the humidity in the cellar. I have never seen a brick floor in any of the cellars that I know, but I just wanted to let you know. If you are not sure what material to use for the floor for some households, that might be an option.

Sims updates
I haven't been active with simming last month, except some bits of rebuilding the Via Veronaville Lots with more Bergisches FWH.

Bürgerhaus definition
The Weiler with the detached FWH has always been a small village and not a place with town rights, although there's not much known about its settlement history, except that it is a former Luftkurort. The person I speak with meant that a "Bürgerhaus" is a house for people with administrative professions, such as teachers and civil service officials. The other old non-farmhouses could indeed be built as craftsmen workshops, such as a brewery.

Build/buy
Thank you for educating me about the infrastructure history!
I haven't been active with building Lots in Windenburg for a while. But if I have built some new Lots in Windenburg and wonder how likely they would suit for these households, I will post a question again.

Tellier household
My late cats used to roam around in the streets since due to low and slow traffic in my neighborhood, so I'm not familiar with the difficulties around trying to prevent cats from escaping the lot.
A swimming pool is difficult to place as I want to make their garden partly sloped, but I imagine they would own a jacuzzi or a mobile swimming pool CC.

Premade headcanons
I have heard that my area of interest used to have an early immigration wave of Italians instead of Poles because Italians were skilled in mining stones for road construction. In that case, how likely would the Montys live here for multiple generations already instead of being 1st-gen guest-worker immigrants?

I left away those subheaders without concrete questions. Feel free to include them again when new questions pop up.


Bürgerhaus

Administrative professions:
I guess that this person used the term incorrectly then.
In a small village, there usually are not than many people with an administrative profession. When a village was a municipality of its own and not part of a bigger municipality, they barely had enough pupils in each grade so that pupils of different grades were taught in the same classrom by the same teacher. Depending on the number of children (and the municipality's finances), there often just were one or two teachers, teaching four or even all eight grades at once. Such a village also only would have a Volksschule (equivalent to the later Hauptschule, just with even one year less). Hardly anybody from a village would attend a Gymnasium and if they did, they would go to the nearest town to do so.
Teachers in villages also usually were poorly paid which means that they could not afford too nice houses. I know a person who has genealogy as a hobby and due to their research, this person also has quite a lot of data about village teachers. They often were (initially) not allowed to marry because they were considered too poor to support a family. They usually lived together with the woman, nevertheless, and had some illegitimate children together, but probably fewer than they otherwise would have had due to the stigma. They often got the permission to marry some years later when the risk of having more children was significantly lower.
The number of civil service officials also was quite limited. Elected functions like mayor or municipal council only work part-time in those functions and have a regular full-time job in addition to it (it still is that way today in small municipalities). I could not find historic information, but I could find information for today from statistik-bw.de (therefore for Baden-Württemberg). Municipalities with less than 1000 inhabitants in average have 4,3 full-time employees per 1000 inhabitants in the municipal administration. As these administrative employees have many tasks that did not yet exist in the past, the number of employees should have been lower in the past.
In addition to the two jobs that you mentioned, the priest and the pastoral administration also could have had a townhouse-like house, if the village had its own parish. But even with that, I see a potential for maybe ten people in such jobs and as it was common that sons took up their fathers' professions, the number of houses might even have been lower.

Crafts:
Craftsmen workshops definitely were common, but not necessarily the crafts that you have in mind. Crafts related to producing food or drinks typically existed in towns and cities to produce for the population there while in villages, the farmers usually produced such products themselves as they had access to the necessary starting products and municipal facilities (like communal bake house or brewery), sometimes even own facilities. Therefore, craftsmen in such professions in a village would not have many customers or a market near them, oten making the profession unprofitable. Common crafts in villages were those that farmers needed, but could not do themselves. Thus, there usually were blacksmiths, coopers (producing barrels), carpenters, well diggers, wheelwrights etc. This also explains why the vast majority of such houses were converted to purely residential buildings at a later point in time: Some of these professions now are (nearly) extinct and the others have so much different requirements today that people with that job work outside of their homes.


Tellier household

Enclosures:
I do not know any person who ever tried to limit their cat to just the garden. Either cats are indoors all the time (maybe with access to a balcony and a net above the balcony if the owners fear that the cat might try to jump off the balcony) or they have access to the outside and can go wherever they want to go there. Keeping cats indoors exclusively is much more common in cities and towns than in villages.

Main roads:
I grew up on the main road of my home village and only very few cats died due to traffic within those few hundreds of meters where I could notice it. Cars and trucks definitely were not slow (many decided to keep 60-70 km/h until the first turn of the street a few hundred meters further into the village), but there still was relatively little traffic. The exact location of a village also may be relevant for that. My village was inbetween the main town and a smaller town of the administrative district, but there was a second route that connected both towns through another village that way maybe a kilometer shorter than the route through my home village. Therefore, the majority of people who wanted to go from one of those towns to the other one would choose the other route and mainly people from my home village itself were the ones on the streets of the village.

Pools:
Mobile swimming pools are much more common than jacuzzis. There also are really big ones, e.g. this one with a length of 10 meters: https://www.aufstellpools.de/161-me...0-kit730eco.jpg


Premade headcanons

Maybe somebody from Italy has read and can help with more information as I do not have that much information on this topic.

There was some migration, but numbers were only a small percentage of those during Gastarbeiter times. Most of that early migration was from the Alpine region of Italy, not from the South, thus from a part of Italy where the population looks just like average Middle Europeans. I assume that a lot of those early migrants were native speakers of German as quite a few Bavarians settled Alpine regions outside of Bavaria, as Southern Tyrol used to be part of Tyrol for a very long period of time and as big parts of Northern Italy belonged to the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations for many centuries and therefore had German influence. Also, the unification of Italy took place at a relatively late point in time. Therefore, any early migrants probably would not even feel and identify as Italian, not speak Italian anymore (if they ever did), not use Italian given names anymore (if the ever did) etc. If the Montys migrated generations ago, they also most likely would have lost their South Italian look by now as their ancestors had to find spouses and those spouses would most likely have a more Middle European appearance. Thus, no, I do not think that it is very plausible that the Montys migrated several generations before Patrizio and Isabella. Of course, the current backstory also is not perfect, as it is unrealistic that first generation migrant workers own such an expensive estate. However, I think that can be fixed in a more plausible way with a lottery win or something like that.



If the videos of the first German Big Brother season were helpful for you: waipu.tv now has the first two seasons available. To watch them, you need an account, but not paid subscription. The two seasons are supposed to be available for three months. It is possible that additional seasons will be available afterwards or even earlier if the interest is big enough.

Via Veronaville makeovers
https://imgur.com/a/2jBjTQU
Here are some of my recent build screenshots from the last months. I want to place Via Veronaville 54 at the village center around the church, and shift the middle road on an intersection using LotAdjuster (I already tested this with a test Lot). But first I want to redesign the hood road layout for the Capp side by using two NRW villages at a river as references for road layouts.

Tellier household (via Veronaville 26)
https://imgur.com/a/4R1vYbW
Can you help me out with some of my questions about the room layouts for this room? In case you cannot view the Imgur captions well, I post them here as well:
* Since Thomas' sister Sandra just attends secondary school as well (5th grade Gym), would it suit better to place the 2nd computer in the common hobby room instead of his bedroom so it's shared by both kids? Or would it make more sense to keep it in Thomas' room in case he would need it more often for schoolwork than her and that she can use the computer downstairs?
* DG: The left room could be a storage/guest room, whilst I want to make the right room into a hobby/playroom, where Hans' guitars are placed amongst other stuff. What other functional objects would fit well in the DG hobby room?

Other Italian households
Rocca household: https://imgur.com/IfA9fIZ
Romeo household: https://imgur.com/1quxfiG
How likely would the households Rocca and Romeo be (Northern) Italians that already live in Germany for more than one generation? I don't have a solid backstory about them yet, but the TS4 premades still have Italian names (Sergio and Paulo).

Tellier household

Short-cord version of the hanging lamp
Maybe it works with the shiftable everything mod?

Computer location
At that time, pupils did not need a computer for school too often. Homework was done in handwriting on paper. It was only needed a few times per schoolyear to prepare presentation etc. Thus, if you place it in Thomas' room, it is clear that he uses it for gaming and/or chatting regularly.
What are the rules for using the other computer? Could Sandra use the other computer? How old is Thomas? I can see alcohol bottles in the picture that would be legal at 18+, but also toys that might be more suited for a younger age. Did Thomas buy the computer or did his parents buy it? Are his parents rather strict and conservative or do they rather have a laissez-faire attitude? Does the computer need internet access and, if yes, does the room have internet access? Wlan does not always work that well on different levels of a building and having computers on two different floors means more work if both should have internet access. I cannot answer your questions with my current knowledge, but I think that my questions might help you to find a good answer yourself.
Just for the record: the big shelf looks quite empty compared with the rest of the room. Maybe, you also can use the shiftable everything mod or OMSPs to put more stuff into the shelf.

DG layout
That 1-tile corner really looks strange. Would it be an option to move the one wall piece on the right side of the hallway one tile upwards and to delete the wall piece on the left side? It would make more sense if that part of the hallway had been a 3x3 room before the wall breakthrough and not just a 3x2 room.

Hobby/Playroom
Are you sure that the whole room is just supposed to be for hobbies? Imho the house definitely lacks some kind of storage - a place where the family e.g. can put Christmas decorations during summer and skiing equipment during winter.
You might add an exercise bike and a (decorative) yoga mat as sports equipment. As the musical instruments require a lot of space, I would not add more of those, but maybe you can find some purely decorative musical instruments and/or instrument cases.

Clothes drying rack
I am not sure whether the place of this item is a good choice. The hallway is not very big so that it would take quite some time until the clothes would be dry and at least when the humidity is a bit higher, the clothes also might not smell too nicely due to that. I do not have a better suggestion where you could place it, however. As the family has a small garden, I would prefer a rotary clothes dryer outdoors anyway. Drying outdoors works perfectly fine even at temperatures below zero.


Other Italian households

Given their ages, they should be the second generation that was already born in Germany. With the combinations of names and looks, imho it is rather unrealistic that their ancestors already were in Germany pre-war.
Several of the given names are names that Italians in Germany would be less likely to use than Italians in Italy. The use of such names (like Saturio and Narciso) would become less with each generation and the use of names (relatively) common in both cultures/languages (like Vera and Elena) would increase. This is especially true for a name like Andrea which in Germany is a typical girl's name while in Italy it is a boy's name. While it is not illegal to name your son Andrea (as long as the child has a second non-ambiguous given name), it already seems an unlikely choice for a 3rd generation child and it would be even less plausible the longer the family lives in Germany.



Orientation of churches
As I had an interesting discussion about this topic recently, I wondered whether you are aware that many churches are orientated in a very similar way (altar in the east, main entrance in the west). Pretty much all medieval churches in Germany have that orientation and even when that old church was replaced, a new replacement usually had the same orientation. After the middle age, the orientation was not obligatory anymore, but the preferred option whenever it was possible.
You can find more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientation_of_churches (The German version of this article contains a bit more information than the English one.)

Tellier
Obsidian notes repost: https://imgur.com/a/obsidian-tellier-household-F9HFQdF

I have to check if the lamp cord won't clip with the top floor even after one shift up.

Parents: Father Hans (bio/chem/French Realschule teacher) is fairly laidback. Regarding Margarete (stay-at-home mom with culinary side jobs who enjoys drinking wine), I assume she is probably not very strict regarding underage drinking, but rather she is strict regarding tidiness and cleaniness because of her high Neat score. Also, I imagine she's new-agey spiritual and/or an active Catholic based on her high score in Paranormal interest. Since I picture that Margerete is a stereotypical female German villager, what aspects regarding the house and her kids' behavior would be her main concerns in order to maintain a good reputation in her village?

Thomas room: I assumed that alcohol usage (even spirits mixed with soda) was already common at age 14/15 in small villages, but I can imagine it's too young to display that many bottles on a shelf in his room. Would one bottle of beer or Breezer be more plausible, or none at all?
I assume his father gifted him the 2nd PC for his 13th or 14th birthday (2003 or '04), and assumed he also had cable internet access. The fact that a teenager could have their own computer with cable internet in the early 00s is based on my Dutch teenage experiences, so I don't know how much behind the German technology was back then. Sandra could still use the main computer on the EG for her own games, though the household also owns a game console in the living room.
What deco toys are less suited for a 14/15 year old teenage boy and which deco clutter would suit better instead? His main interests are sci-fi, entertainment (mainstream movies and games, and hip-hop music), fashion (sporty/hip-hop in bright colors), food (sausages, pizza and Döner ), and sports (especially football/soccer).

DG: I was also open to add other stuff than hobby objects in the main room, so yeah, I can decorate the non-functional sloped spaces with storage deco. I was thinking of adding more deco cabinets and closets and perhaps find a laid-down Christmas tree CC. Would carboard moving boxes also work as off-season storage deco? I placed a 1-tile corner in the hallway to make the door accessible because otherwise, the door gets blocked by the staircase. I can remove the walls and place the decorative vertical open beams on the same position as the staircase railing instead. I still have to rework the backyard because I want to make it partly sloped and give them a basic storage shed instead of a garden house. I still have to find a good Immo floorplan reference for where to position their vaulted cellar, as the FWH Immo ads with floorplans included usually don't show where the entrance to the vaulted cellar is, unlike ads containing floorplans with regular cellars.

Italian households
Do you mean the adult Italians are 2nd gen and their teens/kids 3rd gen? Do you know by your RL or media experiences what Italo-German masculine names are more common for 3rd gens? (can be anything, as Andrea:s is an OC sibling and not a TS4 premade recreation)

In-game updates
https://imgur.com/a/eZmOjDJ
I've been working on redesigning the road layout of Veronaville based on a small, yet touristic village in Sauerland with plenty of detached FWH, although I assume a fair amount of them were built after WWII because this village was affected. The road layout of the Monty side will be based on a different village because it will mainly contain of post-war Neubau (still having to fix some of the road layouts, so no screenshots yet). Never heard about preferred church orientations, so your tip will come in handy if I'm setteled on where to place the church!

Tellier

Hans - headcanon
At big companies, you have a quite solid job protection. I am not a lawyer, but I think that it would be difficult or even impossible to be fired for a mistake. It would require something like a deliberate violation of work processes or ignoring the directions of his boss to be fired (and even then it might have to happen more than once to be sufficient for being fired).
I also think that it would be difficult to find a new job with such a backstory. Somebody who is working for such a big company usually would look for a new job while still working in the current job. Therefore, not being employed anymore definitely will rise questions in a job interview or be the reason for not being invited to a job interview at all. This would especially be true in case of a "fristlose Kündigung" (termination without notice period) as the job certificate from the previous employer then would have that date on it while regular terminations only happen at the end (or less common 15th) of a month. The job certificates are really important for finding a new job in Germany. There might be some tricks for hiding it, like presenting an intermediate certificate and telling the new employer that the final certificate is not ready yet, but in a rural area chances are high that somebody working for the potential new employer knows a former coworker of Hans so that the reason for the termination will become known nevertheless.
Therefore, Hans' backstory should be toned down a bit so that it was not a firing. Maybe his company merged with another company and that was the reason why they needed less employees and some employees were terminated with a notice period and a payoff.

Parents
Both new-agey spiritual and active Catholic is not really possible imho.
I do not think that there is just one stereotype for female villagers. However, regarding the rest of your description, I think she would want her children to greet other villagers when they see them in the streets. She also would want them to take off their shoes when they go into somebody else's home (or at least offer to take them off).
If you go for the Catholic route instead of the new-age one, she might also make her husband and children go to church with her on Sundays, make the children be altar servers (at least the girl, the boy already is at the upper end of the age span for that), maybe even make them deliver the parochial newsletter to other households.

Thomas' room
I even know of 12 year olds who ended up in hospital with alcohol poisoning. It's really about the amount of alcohol and the type. In 2004, a law was passed that alcopops (like Bacardi Breezer) only may be sold to adults. Therefore, I think that beer is the only drink that should be on display. It may be more than a bottle - maybe a sixpack.
Do you mean cable as in cable TV or as in LAN cable? If you mean the first one: Even today only about 25 % of Germans have internet via cable and it is more common in urban areas than in rural areas. Back then it often was not available at all in rural areas - maybe because there barely was demand as TV via satellite dish is for free while cable access costs money. In my last posting, I meant the latter option, nevertheless. The internet connection usually was combined with the telephone connection and if you wanted to have LAN cables somewhere else, you had to install them first. As German houses usually are built rather solid, it is common to hide any kind of cables and tubes inside the walls. Therefore, it requires some effort when adding more cables at a later point in time, especially when there are no empty tubes available. With Fachwerkhäuser, it is even more difficult as the walls are thinner so that there might not be enough space inside and as it is not advisable to use modern materials when covering holes in partitions filled with traditional materials. So while it technically definitely is possible to have LAN cables in every room, many people did not want to do that because it would either have been a lot of work or because there would have been visible cables. I even know a family who lives in a Fachwerkhaus who had (maybe still has) quite expensive internet via satellite because they wanted to avoid the cable problem that way. (There also still are quite a few people who are afraid of WLAN because they think it might cause cancer etc.)
Just as additional information: Germany is very backward in regards to internet connection (at least in comparison with the rest of the EU). That dates back to some wrong decisions by Kohl in the 80s. We got our first internet connection in 2001 IIRC and it had less than 1 MB/s. The provider only laid cables for 50 or 100 households and those households who did not get one of those connections then had to wait for several years before more were added. It also took several years before faster internet became available. That might also be a reason why some parents preferred to have computers in a central location so that it was a bit more easy to ensure that no one causes so much traffic that the others have problems to use the internet.
Nevertheless, as the computer was a present just for Thomas and as you describe his parents as rather laid back, I could imagine that the computer is in his room and that his parents might not be against WLAN (at least unless the mother is not new-agey).
Deco: I am sorry, but I do not remember exactly what kind of toys he has in his room right now. I would try to use stuff that is more related to him. Maybe he still has one or more skateboards and put one of them on a shelf. He also could have put a soccer ball there. If he also likes watching soccer, he also might have jerseys from his favorite players (although those maybe would not be placed on a shelf). MP3 players already existed, but CDs still were popular so maybe you also could display some CDs and/or some other music-related thing. He also could display some of his favorite caps and sneakers. Maybe you also can find some star wars merchandising for his interests in sci-fi and mainstream movies. If you think that he might also be interested in Lego Technic, you could get him a Death Star although I am not sure whether Lego Technic really would match him considering how you described him.

DG
Cardboard boxes definitely are a good choice. They do not have to have the standard moving box size. Many people use boxes they got with some kind of product instead of throwing them away. You also can use specific plastic storage boxes. Any mix of boxes will work.
I would mainly use shelves (Allzweckregal), but plain closets and old furniture that looks like they did not want to have it in the main part of the house anymore also would work.
I would not place a christmas tree there. Even today only about 1/4 of German households has an artificial tree. The majority of people today still prefers natural trees and the percentage was even bigger back then.

Vaulted cellar
A regular cellar is a part of the building on top of the baseplate usually built at the same time, included in the architect's plan and requiring a building permission. Vaulted cellars in contrast are artificial caves that were dug into the ground, mostly at a time when no architects and building permissions were needed yet. They were dug at a place where people assumed that the earth and stone above the cellar were stable enough to not collapse and that location often does not match the location of the house. It even made sense to built it somewhere else so that less weight would be on top of it as old FWHs also do not have a proper base plate, just compacted earth beneath them. Most vaulted cellars that I know are separate from the house in that way that neither the cellar is beneath the house nor the entrance is inside the house. If the entrance is inside the house, it usually is a door with stairs leading away from the house and outside the earth is high enough to cover the stairs. As you plan a sloped lot, that might be an option. Most vaulted cellars also are not too big, with less floor space than the house. I also know a few bigger ones that are directly beneath the building, but these buildings often used to be breweries or other companies who needed to be able to store their goods at a low temperature. Those vaulted cellars often are used for restaurants or similar businesses today.


Italian households

Yes, that is what I meant.

I know several people with names that have German counterparts like Alessandro (Alexander) and Massimiliano (Maximilian). Some also have names that are less obvious Italian because they also are common amongst Germans like Marco (always a bit popular, never at the top of rankings) or Luca (peak of popularity in 2006 as 3rd most common name for boys born that year). People with a higher level of education have a higher tendency to use names of ancestors (like grandparents or great-grandparents) for their children.
Be aware that there are a few Italian names like Enrico and Ricardo that are/were popular amongst Germans with low education and/or typical names in former East Germany. Those names now have a certain reputation and I would assume (but did not search for evidence) that those names are less popular amongst Italians with high education for that reason.


In-game updates

Hardly any FWH were built after WW2. There already was a big decline around 1900 that continued during the following decades. So even if people wanted to built FWHs after WW2, there were only very few people left who knew how to built them from scratch so that they would not have been able to built a bigger amount of FWH in a short period of time. It is much more likely that the houses were damaged and had to be repaired. It was common that roofs and windows were damaged/destroyed. Sometimes the destruction was used as an excuse to build an additional floor on top of the house although that should be more common in bigger towns and cities where the lack of living space was a much bigger problem than in rural areas.

Tellier household
In that case, I go for the scenario that Margarete is into new-age (such as homeopathy) due to her high interest in Paranormal. Hans has neutral interest in Paranormal. So given that the Tellier household has a new-agey mother, would they more likely have satellite internet instead, and would Thomas still have internet connection on his own computer in his room?

https://imgur.com/a/ts2-tellier-redux-fall-2024-Y2qSK7b
I've made new screenshots of the rooms. My questions about layout and deco are included in the image captions.

Premade headcanons
Now I imagine that Sims with low to zero interest in Paranormal are more likely to visit the church regularly, such as most of the Capps, but also Patrizio and Bianca Monty. I'm curious, how would the feud between Capp and Monty be unfold if they visit the church simultaneously? On the other hand, Hermia Capp has zero interest in Paranormal as well, yet her clothing style is more like gothic/metal. In this case, would she more likely be a metalhead than a goth? And how would her disinterest in paranormality be expressed? What would her relationship to traditional religion be like? (I'm not very familiar with how 2000s goth/metal culture was like)

TS4/4t2 Italo premades: So if I understood correctly, are Paulo and Sergio most likely names that would be given to 3rd gen Italo-Germans from the post-war Gastarbeiter wave?

Build/Buy
ETA: when it comes to picking poster meshes, were German magazines pressed exclusively in ISO-A4 sizes? Because in my memories, Dutch magazines did *not* have consistent paper ratio sizes.


https://imgur.com/a/cc-cleanup-june-2024-6c8CG4Z
Which fireplace tools and gravestone CCs are worth keeping for my theme?

Which objects from the 4t2 Basement kit match well with storage clutter in typical German households? https://sims4t2bb.tumblr.com/basementtreasures

Do you think this closet mesh looks close enough to antique German furnutire, such as the Frankfurter Shrank? https://www.tumblr.com/jacky93sims/...-woodland-ranch

What furniture from the FB group "Lost Places Deutschland" are fitted for the Capp household? (I have access to that group)

FWH in 20th century: I assume that FWH (re)built after 1900 were more common in Bergisches land, as I've seen some from 1920s or something (real-life or online). The post-war ones in Sauerland could be reconstructions indeed.