Omg I absolutely love the realism. I thought I was the only one here obsessed with messy old school teenage rooms filled with posters. It's something I rarely see in the sims community. I also love the living room but the bedrooms are another level. My only personal preference is to avoid real life photographs on posters and try using the bands' artwork instead, it reminds me of low budget games trying to be realistic .

Sorry that it took me so long to answer. I have a period with a very high workload in my job and I had Covid recently so that many things remained undone. The high workload will continue for a while so that it might also affect future postings.

CAS girl's bedroom
Is there any possibility to have a small gap between the heater and the curtain? Moving the heater down a bit or the curtains up a bit. I do not know how hot these heaters can get, but synthetic fibres usually are rather heat-sensitive so that it might be a possible fire source.
I like how the desk area looks like.
VHS or DVD player: I would add one. In rural areas, there is no cable TV and for an old, protected house, you might only get the permission to add one satellite dish, but not several ones. Thus, the more rooms of the house are supposed to have TV reception, the more complicated it will be. Therefore, I could imagine that only the living room has TV reception while the other TVs do not. VHS might be a good option because that way, the family members can record their preferred shows on the main TV and later watch them in their own rooms.
As the Spongebob deco just caught my eye: You could search for "Bernd das Brot". That is a character from a German children's channel that also became popular amongst adults around the time of your neighborhood. If you cannot find any such CC, you might try to create a recolor of the Spongebob deco. Of course, the dimensions and the arms and legs do not match 100 %, but the result might be close enough that a German person might recognize it.

Kitchen
If you want to have a typical German kitchen, you should remove the trash compactor. Compacted trash causes some problems when it is collected. Therefore, the use of trash compactors is forbidden pretty much everywhere (It is regulated on municipal level so that it was not possible for me to check the regulations for every single municipality.)

Lighting next to bed
You can google "Nachttischlampe" and have a look at the lamps that do not look too special. I do not think that the common versions changed a lot during the last 20 years.
I never saw any wall-mounted lamps in private homes, just in hotels (although that most likely was in other countries). If you want some examples nevertheless, you can google for "Leselampe Bett". Versions that are attached to the bed with a clip should definitely be more common than wall-mounted options.
For double beds, I would rather suggest, to find some CC that looks like a bed with integrated bedside tables. These type of bed should be relatively common and there, some kind of light fixture often is integrated in the headboard which allows to have a background light that is less dazzling than the alternatives.
Here are some examples of such double beds:
https://www.betten.de/img/schubkast...ett-groesse.jpg
https://www.woestmann.de/fileadmin/..._13d3d00d1e.jpg
https://img.archiexpo.de/images_ae/...47-4660575.webp

School
Neither secondary schools nor primary schools had any playground equipment.
The majority of pupils brought food from home and therefore did not spend the break waiting to buy food. The kiosk offered a bigger variety of food than you could bring from home and therefore most pupils preferred it and as they only bought food from the kiosk a few times per month, it was something special.
It is easier to get to know the pupils from your own class, but it is not impossible to get to know the others as well. For a few subjects, classes could be different (physical education by gender, religious education by denomination, third foreign language vs. mathematical scientific branch etc). There also were events and activities that included several classes or even grades or where classes were not relevant (e.g. year of birth for the sports festival and swimming festival). Having a friend in common or using the same bus also were sufficient to get to know another person better.
As there were no such objects available, I cannot recall anything special. There were a few cases when some things were considered "uncool", but that were individual cases like one guy with a lack of hygiene or a girl with overprotective parents who did lots of stupid things.
Playing with a footbag was popular amongst some of the boys (the ones who played soccer in a club) at least until 9th grade. Smoking and drinking alcohol were a topic from the age of about twelve, but you did not have do do this, to be "cool". Kissing was not really a topic because there hardly were any couples within a class and even if there was a couple, they usually would not kiss during school hours. First WooHoo definitely is a topic that you only would share with very close friends (gender might matter).
I think that your SO's observation is true. In Gymnasium, imho, there is less pressure to be "cool" by doing what everybody does and more acceptance for individuality. And, of course, you can do playful/childlike stuff during one part of the day and drink alcohol and smoke during another part of the day. These things are not mutually exclusive.

Parties
I guess I only know boring people, but parties usually were birthday parties or when there was a special reason (like going abroad for a year). Public festivals were more common - several towns have street festivals, villages often host festivals for certain anniversaries (like when they are 1000 years old) and there also were "Plattenparties" (disco for those that are too young to go to real clubs). There also might be more festivals related to regional aspects, like beer festivals, wine festivals, festivals for fishing enthusiasts etc. From spring to fall, you usually can attend some kind of festival on every weekend and many of them also try to be attractive to younger people (e.g. by having several stages with different type of music, by offering a variety of food and drinks etc). It was more common to attend these events. As these festivals also were interesting for adults, you could go there with your parents, then meet your friends and spend time with them and only meet your parents again when it is time to go home.
Duration of parties: There are too many factors to have a general rule for that. From the legal point of view, you have to turn off music outside or turn down to "Zimmerlautstärke" (to a level so that it is not audible outside). Screaming and shouting is also not okay. After midnight, even regular conversations in the garden can be a problem. However, it depends a lot on your neighbors because the public order office/police only will come to your house if somebody complains about you.
Most parties were in the living room, hobby/game room or cellar. Garden parties were extremely rare because there you would have to care about the party noise, while a party indoors usually is no problem. Garden sheds usually were used to store gardening equipment and they were not suitable for hosting parties. I have not attended too many barbecues, but even there, often one person stayed outside next to the barbecue while the guests were inside. The only exceptions were one person who has an open hall (just three walls) on the lot and parties where the number of guests simply was too big to fit them into any room of the house.
ICQ: Not really, I think. I was the only one amongst my friends who used that mode. The normal users just used "online" and "offline" as modes. The geeks were connected 24/7 and were "N/A" or "away" most of the time. I would say that ICQ only was cool before it became mainstream. You could tell apart the early users and the ones who joined later by the user ID numbers. By the time ICQ had many more users as before, most of the geeks also had IRC accounts and used that tool in addition to ICQ.

Schrankwand
The attempt is a beginning, but it needs a bit of improvment imho. The old Schrankwände that I know usually are rectangular and one big piece. Thus, you should fill up gaps like the upper left corner. Old Schrankwände also have rear walls so that the wallpaper should not be visible. As Schrankwände like this are quite heavy (you need several people to move them around even if they are completely empty), just having legs does not seem stable enough to me. Maybe you can place the upper shelves also on the ground in a way that they cover the space, but that most of them is hidden inside of the other items that you placed? I assume that you placed the TV on the right side because this fits the room layout. However, the Schrankwände were not customized. Therefore, the TV usually would be in the middle of the Schrankwand because it was the one central living room item. (Although, of course, there also are Schrankwände without any space for a TV at all from that period.)

Thanks for letting me know! I hope you recovered well, and I will take the delayed replied into account.

School
Interesting to hear that PDA during schooltime was less common during your time (when I was in 9th grade, two classmates went steady w/ each other). But it kinda makes sense to me with the formerly short days at school.

Parties
I imagine the Capps complaining easily, but that the Summerdreams are forgiven by most Sims . But yeah, (vaulted) cellar parties it is then for the elves.

Pop culture
Can you recall from which year ICQ became mainstream? For now, I assume that Puck and other techy Sims would use IRC aside of ICQ, and the less techy ones texting or sometimes ICQ (my reference: in NL, chatting through PC was already common in 2003).
Lol, now I imagine frequent sibling quarrels and petty revenges regarding recording VCR, like the brother fooling around with the video record schedule settings of his sister :p
And I will check where to place satellite dish deco (here, it was more common amongst immigrants, but my SO also had satellite in the countryside)

Deco
Was the curtain rail usually right above the window, or sometimes also close to the ceiling? I use Inge Jones automatic curtains for the thick ones, but the heights are limited.
Thanks for the feedback about the Schrankwand -- I can try hiding the legs and shifting around with the compartments. But I'm always open to Schrankwand-esk CC suggestions.

Any deco/furniture placement suggestions about the Monty boys rooms? (Link of post 176)

Well, I definitely lost some body points due to the infection, but, at least, I do not sound like Darth Vader anymore when walking up hills or stairs.

School
It is not only because of the short breaks. As mentioned in one of my previous postings (several months ago), there were hardly any relationships with pupils from the same grade or even same school. Many pupils had a relationship with pupils from another school, Azubis or university students. I assume that this has a rather discouraging effect if there are no other PDAs.
The few PDAs that I remember mostly included holding hands and one "picknick" with blankets on a meadow.
However, I rather remember the ocasions when one class mate rejected another. E.g. there was one girl who wanted to invite a boy to a fastfood restaurant or a boy who made music tapes with his own music (he was not really talented, unfortunately) for two girls because he was in love with both of them. It always only took a few hours until the whole class knew about it and the music tapes were passed around to several class mates who wanted to make fun of it.

Parties
If you keep the lot positions similar to original Veronaville, there should be sufficient space between the lots so that the Capp family is not disturbed by the Summerdream parties.

Pop culture
I do not remember exactly, but probably around 2003. In 2001, it definitely was not mainstream and around 2005 it was mainstream. It is difficult to pick a date for something that changes gradually.
As long as your sims rely on VHS, quarrels could occur. At some point, my parents got a new TV with an external harddrive for recordings and two cables to the same satellite dish. From that point on, it was possible to record two different shows at the same time and even watch a third channel live as long as the third channel belonged to the same group of channels as one of the recordings. I do not remember exactly when my parents bought it, but most likely it was slightly after the time of your Veronaville.
Satellite dishs still should be the most common option in rural areas. Even today, cable TV is not available here. I just checked it and the cable TV companies only offer their services via internet connection and internet connections back then were not good enough for that (in several places they still are not good enough for that today). Before satellite dishs became common, people had an antenna on the roof. With that antenna, you usually only had a good reception of the public service broadcasters (ARD, ZDF plus a regional channel depending on where exactly you live). My father tweaked our antenna a bit so that there were about 10 channels available including the most common private TV stations - at least when there was no storm between the antenna and the place where the signal came from. My parents replaced the antenna somewhen during the 90ies, but I am quite sure that there still were a few people with an antenna at the time of your Veronaville. That would be an option for people with low interest in TV and probably also mainly older people because the public services broadcasters' audience has a very high average age.

Deco
Both options are possible. Rails (in contrast to rods) sometimes also are attached directly to the ceiling.
Monty teen bedrooms: As there are posters on the side of the dresser: Is it also possible to put some posters on the doors of the dresser? That is a common option for placing posters imho. And you also could put posters on the room door.
Laundry: When it is warm enough, many people like to dry their clothes outdoors. Therefore, you might want to put rotary clothes dryers in some gardens. If a house has several balconies and not all of them have a purpose yet, you can put clothes horses on the balconies. That also could be an option for apartments. It is also unrealistic that every single household has a tumble dryer. These people should have clothes horses available all year long. Drying clothes indoors is faster, but it can cause mold and the clothes might smell not that nice afterwards. Drying clothes outside can take several days, especially during winter, but the clothes will smell really nice afterwards. Thus, depending on the character of your sims, they might prefer one or the other option.

I don't have any Build/Buy updates yet because I'm currently more focused with character design. I started working on the Windenburg map recreation, though.

School
During school events, like multi-day school trips and sports festival, how likely would some pupils from the same grade/age group form couples?
For a Realschule + Fachoberschule with ~500 pupils, how many classes per grade would be common?

Character design
How would the Capps be perceived by rural Germans, since they show off their wealth by living in a big mansion? I understood that showing off wealth is often frowned upon by Germans in general, and one doesn't talk about how much money they earn.

What favorite songs do you imagine for the premades? This is what I thought:
Romeo: hip-hop, R&B, Deutschrap; dislikes party songs like Schnappi because he wants to be cool.
Mercutio: JBL, Die Toten Hosen, Rammstein; actually also likes cheesy hits like Schnappi.
Bianca: 90s alt rock, "Kuschelrock", indie rock (indie is her favorite genre in TS3).
Kent: either rock or trance, or both
Puck: chillout, house, techno, trance (influenced by his mother), but also "indie electronic".
Juliette: mainstream pop, easy listening ballads, Kuschelrock, a mainstream R&B (like Ciara), actually also likes cheesy party hits.
Hermia: Within Temptations, Nightwish, Die Toten Hosen, Martin Kesici, Apocalyptica.
Miranda: poppy rock (e.g. Silbermond), heavy metal (Rammstein), rap (sometimes).
Tybalt: whatever hard-hitting -- angry rap as well as angsty metal and banging hard trance.

Link to bring you back in time: https://www.offiziellecharts.de/cha...e-1105052400000 .

Parties
How common were Plattenparties actually? I asked a few German aquintances but they never heard of it, though I found some image galleries when googling.

School

Couples: I do not remember a single ocasion where something like this happened. As mentioned before, couples within the same class/grade/school were quite rare and even rejections that happened beyond school and school events were the gossip topic number one for the next couple of weeks. Therefore, nobody would have dared to act on their feelings during such ocasions.

Realschule: I guess you saw that Adenau has a Realschule and Fachoberschule (FOS). However, this is extremely uncommon for such a small municipality. In RLP there are almost 200 Realschulen and "Realschule plus", but according to a state website there are only 32 FOS. Therefore, I would rather locate the FOS in a bigger town further away. The administrative district where I grew up did not have any FOS at all. Everybody who wanted to obtain Fachhochschulreife had to attend a school in a neighboring administrative district and commute there by train.
Class size: According to the RLP website, the average class size currently is about 22, which seems really low to me. For 5th and 6th grade, they have the recommendation that class sizes should not exceed 25, but there seems to be no fixed rule. I am not sure whether the small class size is due to the fact that about 20 years have passed or that it is another state. In my state, the maximum class size was 33. Thus, the school would have a look at how many pupils signed up for 5th grade and then create the minimum number of classes possible. During the following years, the number of pupils per class would slowly become lower and at a certain point the school will reorganize the classes when it is possible to reduce the number of classes.
Teachers: There are different study courses for the different school types. Therefore, a Realschullehrer may not teach grades 11+ and a Gymnasiallehrer or Berufsschullehrer (for FOS) might not be interested in teaching Realschüler because Realschullehrer have a lower salary. Therefore, I assume that it is more like two schools within the same building than one combined school.
School types (5-10th grade): Separated Hauptschule (3) and Realschule (8)apparently are almost extinct in RLP nowadays and instead there are combined "Realschule plus" (185). I do not know how the situation was like about 20 years ago.
School types (11+ grade): On its website, RLP does not differ very well between the different types of schools that can be combined with a Realschule plus. You can attend FOS for two years to be allowed to study at a technical college. You can attend FOS for three years to be allowed to study at universities. In addition to that, there is also Berufsschule. When you are doing an Ausbildung, you work in a company half of your time and learn (most of) the stuff related to the job there. The other half of the time, you attend Berufsschule and have the regular subjects (German, English, maths) and few job-related subjects there. For common jobs, a Berufsschule will be close to your home and you alternate between working for one week and going to school for one week. For less common jobs, the Berufsschule might be further away and it is like a boarding school and you stay there for several weeks and then work in the company for several weeks. Berufsschule does not entitle you to study anywhere (At least that is how it was like back then. It might have changed in the meantime). And there is also Berufsfachschule. There you can do an Ausbildung without working at a company at the same time (apart from obligatory internships). It usually depends on the type of job whether you attend Berufsschule or Berufsfachschule. For people with Ausbildung, there are additional optional qualifications like Meister, Techniker and Betriebswirt that can be obtained later and in parallel to a job.


Character design

Capp family: People definitely would assume that the Capps think that they are better and more important than the others. The mansion itself is not such a big problem, I think, because it is old and inherited - a decision that the ancestors made. It is more the whole life situation that creates distance between the Capps and the rest of the village. The Capp ancestors always married people from outside the village. Many people from the region would work for the Capp company, especially in the lower level jobs which means that there is a dependency. I imagine that Consort has business friends from other towns, but not friends within the village. You also thought about sending the teenagers to a school further away to reduce their contact with other teenagers of the village and there are many more examples like this. I think that the Capp family is not part in any of the village's clubs for that reason. Maybe, they would be part of the parish council or be involved in church activities in some other way as this is the possibility to have some influence. The parish council is elected, but there are not so many candidates and people who invest time in church activities usually can get elected relatively easily even if they are not too popular. You might have to think about whether this idea is compatible with the Capp's matriarchal structure as it contradicts the Roman-catholic church's patriarchal structure.

Music:
I do not want to go into detail on every sim, but here are my thoughts in general:
I do not consider Schnappi a party song and I have never been to a party where this song was played. I mostly remember it in connection with Jamba mobile ringtones and once it had reached a certain level of attention, many TV shows started mentioning it and spreading it even further. But it also disappeared again rather quickly.
I do not know anybody who liked both rock and trance and rap, metal and trance also are not really compatible.
Martin Kesici: Was a casting show winner and his biggest hit was quite mainstream. He was invited to Wacken once, but was booed at by the audience due to his background. Therefore, I do not think that he fits into the list. I think that the typical casting show watcher would be more likely to listen to him.
At the beginning of the noughties, there was a wave of German pop groups like Silbermond, Echt, Juli, Ben etc. This wave was not yet completely over at the time of your Veronaville and that type of music was mostly popular with girls.
Tokio Hotel became famous in 2005. Many very young teenage girls were hardcore fans and were screaming, crying and fainting when the band appeared somewhere.
At the end of 2002, the first casting show in Germany started and that type of show quickly became very popular so that there were several similar shows on different TV stations. In your link, there are a few bands that were founded in such casting shows shortly before. Very few of them had long-lasting success, but there were quite some watchers of these shows who would buy all CDs/MP3s of these artists as soon as they were published. Outside of this bubble, the artists were confronted with many prejudices.
(If you are interested in more flamboyant public people, you could have a look at Daniel Küblböck who landed on place 3 in the first ever casting show in Germany.)
One music style that is missing imho is medieval music. I do not think that anybody would just listen to that kind of music, but some fans of alternative, rock or metal music also like medieval music. I could not notice a preference by one gender, but it was more popular with older teenagers, less with the younger ones.
You also might want to have a look at Stefan Raab. He was the host (1999-2015) of a show (TV total) that was popular amongst teenagers. Sometimes, musicians were guests in his show. Thus, a list of these guests might be more significant for the music tasste of teens than the charts. He also hosted a casting show of his own as a reaction on the fact that a competing TV station forbade their casting show winner to have an appearence on TVtotal. And he hosted the Bundesvision Songcontest which is like the Eurovision Songcontest, just with the 16 German states competing against each other. You can find the list of participants for each year online.

Parties: I guess that I used a rather regional term. You could try to google for "Jugenddisco" instead. I know that events like this also took place in other regions of Germany, but I do not know how frequent they are/were.

Due to the heatwave + struggles with crashing, I wasn't much in-game these last weeks, but this week I made time again to resume decorating the Monty Ranch: https://imgur.com/a/mbjgrmW
I realized I miss some antique knickknacks as Deco, and want to look for smaller religious deco based on The Watcher from TSM. Any other suggestions regarding clutter ideas and placements? I have downloaded Lamare's shift mod which make it easier for me to place clutter, but I want to finetune it with the gridless cheat later on.
And would carpet in the bedrooms of the upper floors make sense for a house that still had 70s interior?

School: after I did the math, does 3 to 4 classes per grade sound plausible for a pure Realschule with ~500 pupils? (so I can figure out which Sims I set as classmates in my headcanon)

In my headcanon, I imagine that the mother of my OC/CAS family is a typical "Spießerin", though she has 7 Playful points paired with 4 Nice points. How do you imagine a Spießer:in express their playfulness during social interactions? By telling subtle jokes to others that's typical of German humor?

I somehow managed to post my answer in a wrong thread. I already wondered why it was not shown in this thread. The beginning of the posting is outdated, but I decided against changing it:


I think we have the last hot days for this year. I will be so happy when temperatures are cooler again. Regarding the crashing: Don't give up. Maybe you just have to change a detail and the problems are gone again. I finally managed to get Sims 2 to run on my new notebook after 4,5 months (it wasn't a too big problem as my old notebook still is okay) without crashes or having pink flashing directly when loading the game.

Monty Ranch
The dressers and the "head part" of the bed look fine.
I do not think that Patrizio and Isabella would have a telephone in their bedroom. In the past, people only had one landline telephone in the house and it usually was placed in a relative central place (often even in the hallway). That way people could hear the telephone from all rooms and reach it within a reasonable amount of time. I do not think that Patrizio and Isabella had a telephone connection added to their bedroom at a later point. It also was frowned upon to call people at very early or late hours except in case of an emergency. Patrizio and Isabella definitely have the right age to think that way. That is why I cannot imagine them to have a phone in the bedroom.
I also think that the radio does not fit into their bedroom. Patrizio and Isabella had a strenuous life and I am quite sure that they stood up early in the morning and were busy on other lots or in other parts of the house until they went to bed in the evening. There simply was no time to listen to music in the bedroom. Therefore, I would rather place the radio in another room of the house (or even in several rooms as people did not carry them around). It was popular to have a radio in the kitchen because women back then spent a lot more time on cooking than people (usually) do today. For the bedroom, I think that alarm clocks should be the only electric devices. If you want to, there could be a clock radio, but it would only play music for a few minutes every morning.

The living room also needs some changes, I think. The sofas should be the main part of the living room. It feels strange that they are just in one corner of the living room. There also should be more seats available - usually you also buy one or a few living room chairs along with the sofas. Claudio and Olivia died not that long ago and you mentioned that Bianca is supposed to live with her parents which means that you need at least place for eight people, maybe even for ten as I can imagine that Antonio and Hero also lived in the house for a while after their marriage before they had children. Maybe you can place the Schrankwand on the same wall as the book shelves and have book shelves on both sides of the Schrankwand as an extension of it so that (almost) the whole wall is covered? I am not sure how to best place the furniture in the room to make it look and feel more cosy. Converted into real dimensions, this room would be almost 40 square meters while most living rooms that I saw are 15-25 square meters. Maybe it might make sense to split up the room in two?
A symmetrical Schrankwand definitely would look better. Maybe with the new shift anything hack, you can place the video recorder beneath the TV?

Carpet: I do not think that carpet makes sense for a house in that style and I also do not think that it would have been Patrizio and Isabella's choice as I assume that carpet floors are less common in warmer countries (even though the houses there sometimes are cooler during winter if they do not have a heating).

School: I would go for three classes per grade. 500 pupils in 6 grades means that there are about 83 pupils per grade so that each class would have about 28 pupils.

Spießer: I do not think that the playfulness has to be expressed in every single aspect of your life. I assume that the mother cares a lot about not giving people a reason to gossip about her and her family so that she would be a bit offish with people that she does not know too well. Jokes only might be an option amongst people that she knows very well and whom she trusts completely. I rather can imagine that she e.g. likes boardgame afternoons/evenings with her family or also with close friends. That way she has ocasions when she can act on her playfulness, but in a controlled way that does not contradict with being a Spießerin.

I don't have new screenshots yet due to crashing issues at the Monty Ranch, although I made a start in building a MFH apartment to let Antonio live in.

Meanwhile I have diff questions for general lot decoration:
* Can you recall which Disney and Nintendo stuffed animals were popular during 90s and early 00s?
* Do you also remember what type of shrubs were common in gardens within the lot? I heard that roses and hydrangea are common in gardens, but what about Maxis' shrubs like Bouganvillea, Phlox, "Midbiscus" and Oleander?

Disney and Nintendo:
No, I cannot. I did not have either and I cannot remember any special stuffed animals of my friends.

Shrubs:
As I do not have a green thumb, I cannot give you too detailed information.
Placement: Small blooming shrubs and flowers often can be found in the front garden so that people who pass by can see it. Other small shrubs can be placed along the ways on the lot. Big shrubs usually are used as a screen, often next to the lot border, to have more privacy. It is not really common to place shrubs somewhere in the middle of the garden. That is only common for trees and especially fruit trees are popular.
Climate: You should check which plants can survive a cold German winter. In some parts of the Eifel, temperatures up (or down?) to -20 °C are possible. Therefore, I would ensure that all plants can deal with at least -10 °C (for lower temperatures, you can imagine that the inhabitants take additional measures to protect plants). Oleanders e.g. are quite common in Germany, but people to not plant them directly in the garden. They plant them in big pots instead so that they can be indoors during winter.
Other shrubs: I was too lazy to look up all the translations, but these shrubs also are quite common in Germany: Thuja, Scheinzypresse, Bergilex, Ginster, Kirschlorbeer, Buchs, Flieder, Heidekraut. If you also consider raspberry bushes as shrubs, they might be a good option for families with children. You could place them at the border of the kitchen garden.

Plants
I looked up the English translations of the shrubs on Wiki, but it was disappointing to see that I couldn't find most of them for TS2

Monty Ranch
https://imgur.com/a/xu1VTv1
I found a creative way to assemble a better Schrankwand. When I Googled for 70s Schrankwänder, I also found some asymmetric ones, but I see where you're coming from regarding the central placement of the TV. What kind of additional lamps would suit in the living room? And are (small) altars for deceased family members common amongst Catholics?

What suggestions do you have for hobby rooms/office layout regarding furniture placement and deco? For the bookshelf, I'm planning to put in some photo frames.
Any suggestions for a garden layout regarding Gartenwege? What would be the most logical parking spot for their two cars?
In spring and summer, they probably have an outdoor dining table in the atrium and I want to create a basic yard with grass, playground and some flowers/shrubs at the lot borders and the entrances. Or would a cottage garden suit them better? (Patrizio has a vineyard instead of llamas).

Since I'm going on holiday this week, I will post these screenshots already

CAS family interior: hallway, hobby room, bathrooms
https://imgur.com/a/5hjQBg3

MFH with 5 apartments
https://imgur.com/a/sOfsoXS
Any suggestions/feedback for the room layouts of Unit 1 (basement) and Unit 2? From those apartments, no pictures were published so I had to improvise. Also, in which apartment unit would Antonio's family live in regarding size-affordability ratio? I imagine the twins have a shared bedroom.

ZFH (2 apartments)
https://imgur.com/a/iWZH31J
For now, this is going to be a "filler lot" because I don't have plans yet which households I want to move in there and in which hood I want to place it.

I have to clean up Object meshes regularly due to OBJD-related crashes, so I wonder: which chairs are too modern or uncommon for early 00s houses and older? https://imgur.com/rIddeMr

CAS family home

Hobby area: The plant seems to be very close to the piano and the stuff on the sideboard. That seems rather unpractical to me. Maybe you can move the pet cage closer to the wall and the piano also a bit to the left to create more room for the plant.

Bathroom ground floor: The light above the mirror looks strange. I would replace it with a plain horizontal lamp or move the lamp to the wall around the corner.
I also do not think that people would place cleaning stuff on the floor next to the toilet. Flushing the toilet creates aerosols so that the items on the floor would be in a unhygienic state.

Bathroom 1st floor: It looks like the ceiling lamp is attached to one of the beams. That is not realistic because any wires would be in the regular part of the ceiling, not within the beams.
I also never have seen a bathroom with three windows. Bathrooms usually have one window, two already are rather an exception.
The shelf with shampoo etc. above the bathtub should be lower so that a person sitting in the bathtub can reach it.
The bathroom also is not really a good choice for the clothing rack. The room is not that big and has a rather high level of humidity because it is a bathroom. Thus, the clothes will dry rather slowly and there is a danger of mold. As the lot has a big garden, the most logical option would be drying the clothes outside (which even works at temperatures below zero btw). If you have some unused space in the attic, that might be an alternative if you want to have the clothes rack indoors. The bigger the room, the better and in the attic you can imagine that your sims keep the doors to neighboring rooms open so that the humidity does not become too high.
The deco shower looks strange. At first glance, I thought it looks like a reading lamp. Shower hoses are very flexible so that due to gravity they just hang down. The hose of your shower is curved in a way that does not consider gravity.

MFH

The MFH should be located in the nearby town, not in Veronaville imho. It is really big. The number of usable floors is the maximum that you could get approved in a village, but there is so much unused space above due to the game mechanics and that space would be used as another floor in RL so that the building would have too many floors. I also do not know any building with five apartments in a small village and I doubt that such apartments would be appealing to potential tenants when they also can rent a small house or an apartment in a duplex with garden for a similar amound of money.

There are regulations that for newer houses there have to be at least as many parkings as apartments. In reality this means that there is exactly as many parkings as apartments, not more because tenants are not really willing to spend additional money on renting a second parking as parking along the street is hardly more dangerous than parking on the lot. Therefore, I would reduce the number of parkings. You also should change the color of the grey driveway extensions because I never saw parkings with such a color on a private lot. People use the same type of paving that they also use for the paths.

You also should reduce the amount of space that is covered with some kind of floor or switch the tiles to grass paving blocks. Municipalities keep a record of how much terrain is covered with some kind of flooring and the more land is sealed, the more money the owner has to pay for waste water (in addition to the water used within the house). It might be an option to move the parkings (except for garage and carport) to the front of the lot so that they are directly attached to the street.

The balcony railing could need some vertical posts. The longest part of the railing is about ten tiles long without any vertical post inbetween. I seriously doubt that this would work in RL due to gravity.

You should remove the light grey floor tiles and the low fence from the street area. People are not allowed to build or change anything there. The beginning of the driveway to the garage should not match the road. If the road needs to be fixed, the municipality will only fix the road, not any driveways on lots. Therefore, the colors will not be exactly the same in RL, even if the owners decide to have asphalt on their lot.

A building with five apartments would need at least a second waste bin for residual (black) and recyclable (yellow) waste. Paper (blue) and organic waste (brown) should not require a second bin.

Common cellar:
There definitely should be some walls inside as you might need some load bearing walls to provide stability for the floors above. There would be a room with the heating system for the whole house. If it is an oil heating, there would be another room with oil tanks. There also would be a small room with all the electricity meters for the apartment units. It is also common that every apartment has a small part of the cellar as storage. Google "Kellerabteil" to see how they usually look like. They usually are not really big so that you could make them as small as 2x3 tiles if you do not have more space. If you have to fill a bit more space, you can increase the size slightly. And you could have a bike room in the cellar. It is rather risky to keep bikes outside because they might be stolen. That is why many apartment buildings have a room in the cellar that can only be accessed with the right key so that only inhabitants can go there. If there is no bike room, the tenants might carry the bikes into their apartments or leave them somewhere on an upper level of the staircase. I know people who carry their bikes up to three floors high to ensure that they are not stolen.

Carport: Looks fine. I am not sure whether you really need recolors of the fence and the balcony railing. Often, fences and outdoor railings start with a light color, but it becomes darker over the years.

Stairs: Is it correct that you used two types of stairs outside? If yes, please provide a closer look at the bigger stairs as they look rather slippery which might be dangerous during fall and winter. I also would add a stair railing to the small stairs at the back of the lot.

Apartment 1: I do not really like the room layout. It might be better to have one big room for living, dining and kitchen so that there is no need for that hallway anymore. If you have one big room, you also might switch the sides of bathroom and kitchen so that the bathroom can have a window. If you keep the bathroom next to the common cellar, make sure to have some kind of artificial ventilation to get rid of the humidity. The tubing might be hidden within the walls/ceiling, but at least somewhere on the outer walls, there would be a ventilation grille.

Garage: Due to its size (no room for stairs) and location, I think that you only can attach it to apartment 1. If you merge kitchen, hallway and living room into one big room, you would just need a connection door. That would mean that the bathroom should stay (more or less) where it currently is located.

Chimney: Chimneys have to be higher than the rest of the roof (at least 40 cm higher), they have to be close to the roof ridge and they also have to be high enough so that the smoke will be higher than any neighboring building. Therefore, you may not have a fireplace at the location where it currently is in apartment 2.

Apartment 2: I do not think that an apartment of this size would have such a big storage room and the tiny room seems to be too small to be a second bedroom. Moreover the hallway takes too much space in comparison to the size of the whole apartment.
It might be an option to turn storage, second bedroom and part of the hallway to a living room (maybe with some extra tiles on the right where kitchen and living room currently are located) and have the kitchen on the right side of the living room. It is okay if the living room is a connecting room. You also could combine living room and kitchen to one big room and have a second bedroom on the right side of the house.

Apartment 3: The storage should be much smaller or removed. The shape of the hallway is strange and it is too big. Maybe extend the size of the living room by one tile to where the kitchen is right now. That way, you could reduce the size of the hallway a bit and enlarge the living room a bit while the kitchen would have about the same size as before, but with a better, rectangular shape. Maybe I also would move the bathroom further back because it is the room where it is more acceptable that it does not have a window. It also would make sense if the guest bath (extended to 2x3) and the regular bathroom were next to each other because that way both rooms can access the same water pipes. That way, instead of the storage room, you could have a regular room with at least a small window that could be used more flexible (third bedroom, study, utility room).

Apartment 4: The apartment door is facing the wrong direction so that the door mat is inside the apartment. Again, I do not like the shape of the hallway that much, but the layout of the other rooms looks fine. Maybe you can make the hallway one tile shorter so that the kitchen and the master bedroom are a bit bigger?

Apartment 5: Looks fine the way it is. If you prefer bigger kitchens, you might make the bathroom one tile smaller. You might also add more doors to the balcony as it is not really common that the only access to it is in the kitchen. It would be quite normal if the two bedrooms also had access to it and (at least in RL) due to their size balcony doors provide more light than a window.

ZFH

There is no need for a roof underneath the dormer as the dormer wall is directly on top of the ground floor wall.

The location of the second garage at the back of the house is quite uncommon and also rather expensive regarding maintenance because of the land sealing. I would suggest that you also build some houses with a more normal, boring lot layout so that the exceptions remain exceptions. How can the second garage be reached btw? On the left side, there is the other garage and on the right side, there is a fence without any gate. As already mentioned for the MFH, you should consider the use of grass paving blocks for all areas that are not the path to the entrance door and not supposed to be used as terrace with furniture on it. The excessive use of floor tiles reminds me a bit of the discussions about stone gardens in front of houses that are frowned upon by many people because they do not look nice and they do not provide food for bees and other insects.

Basement: I really think that it should somehow be accessible from within the house. Maybe you can remove the storage room (?) of apartment 1 and extend the staircase room so that there is sufficient space for stairs leading to the cellar.

Apartments: What are the two small rooms at the right side of each apartment supposed to be? The guest toilet? Or is it simply unusable space due to CFE? If it is the guest toilet, maybe it would be better to turn it into a 2x2 room and extend the room (second bedroom?) behind it so that you can shorten the hallway. If you do the same for the second apartment, you could turn the main bathroom into a study/third bedroom/utility room/etc. and have the storage room as main bathroom (you even could change this while sims already are living in the building because it just requires redecoration, no structural changes).

Chairs:
Wooden chairs without upholstering are not that common in private homes because they often are uncomfortable after a while. They are quite common in schools, kindergardens, universities and other public buildings however.
L = last row, M = middle row, F = front row; numbers from left to right
Remove: L1, L2, L8, M6, M7, M9, F4, F6
Keep: L6, M2, F1, F3, F5
Keep only for community lots: L7, M4
Rest - decide yourself:
L3, L4 and M4: keep only if you have a particular sim in mind who likes that style
L5: the pattern reminds me of camping chairs, thus I would only use it as rather cheap terrace/balcony furniture
M1: proportions look a bit strange, but wicker furniture is popular
M5: could be more expensive terrace/balcony furniture, but only with a more neutral pattern
M8: Do you have matching lounge furniture?
F2: The armrests look strange. It would be better if the material looked softer and the color matched the color of the rest of the chair better.


I just remembered that yoyos (the slightly more expensive ones that are suited for tricks) were popular for a while during the early 2000s. I guess that there are no interactions and animations for this in Sims 2, but maybe you can find some CC as decoration.

Thanks for your detailed feedback! I'm just back from holiday, so your reply felt for me right on time .

CAS family
The shower hose is a part of the bathtub mesh, but I couldn't find any better European-style shower hoses. Since the mom is a Neat Sim, I can imagine she would place the cleaning stuff somewhere else, like in the drawer. I do imagine less neat Sims having cleansing bottles closer to the toilet like this: https://i.pinimg.com/474x/e3/a1/59/...d82302d2b19.jpg and this: https://i.pinimg.com/474x/6b/ef/cb/...417cfd98a67.jpg .

MFH apartment
The original 5-unit apartment is located in Kirchsahr, where slightly more than 350 inhabitants live, which to me feels like a small village already. The apartment was built in the 20th century so far I can recall. Here's a YT video of the apartment units (cheesy EDM background music alert): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX1doVEEm9s.
Unit 3 floorplan: https://i.pinimg.com/474x/a1/b2/34/...96ebe037403.jpg.
Unit 4 floorplan: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/d0/69/e9/...7525625c89a.jpg.
Unit 5 floorplan: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/de/22/0b/...a16f6180e4b.jpg.
The grey driveway recolor is temporarily -- once I'm satisfied with the placement, I will make them invisible. The balcony railings don't have visible posts at the outside, hence I dragged the fences from corner to corner, but I can check how the posts will look like. The lack of greenery is based on the drone pictures of the reference, but I don't know if the garden laws are less strict in the Ahrweiler. The stone stairs are the same, but I see I used different railings. But I can replace all the railings with metal ones that are decorative (originally made as deco for winding stairs). Would the chimney be located on the basement floor instead?

Unit 3: in the reference, the guest bathroom and main bathroom are separated by the storage room, although I could extend the guest bathroom so it's more accessible for Sims.
Unit 5: since I've made the balcony wider than in the reference (where only the kitchen has a balcony door), I see now it would make sense indeed to add extra balcony doors at the living room and bedroom, and replacing the balcony door at the kitchen with a window.

ZFH
Reference pictures: https://i.pinimg.com/474x/c1/ae/e2/...20a60e25674.jpg, https://i.pinimg.com/474x/78/51/7b/...1e845441474.jpg, https://i.pinimg.com/474x/28/f8/6e/...8ac5541d7be.jpg.
Basement floorplan under a slope https://i.pinimg.com/564x/f9/4c/92/...a0392da1b0f.jpg
Ground floor floorplan: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/9d/98/75/...d3ee50d0db4.jpg
Top floor floorplan: https://i.pinimg.com/474x/ab/4c/32/...154d3b38448.jpg.
The odd garage position is also based by the original floorplan, although I had a hard time finding a good stair position that's accessible for all tenants because the hallway is wider than the cellar and there I couldn't find a good position for a stair leading to the cellar. But it sounds like a good idea to extend the hallway by removing the storage room of Unit 1. The tiny rooms are supposed to be tiny guest toilets, albeit without a sink because otherwise Sims will throw a tantrum. I have to check if it works to extend the guest toilet to the left due to the risk of doors blocking each other on a 1-tile narrow hallway (though I can relocate the door of the master bedroom). In NL, it is common to have stone-paved backyards at row houses and duplexes, but I'm not a fan of it either.
Do you imagine Antonio living in such an apartment?

Monty Ranch
What suggestions do you have for post no.186?

Village culture
I heard that in the northwestern villages of NL, it's more common amongst teens to drink heavily from the age of 15 in "drinking sheds" and eventually have kissed with almost every opposite sex member of their friends group (like during shed parties and/or Kirmes). And I also heard that some parents are in their village known as big drinkers during the Kirmes, but they don't give a darn about that. Have you also witnessed such a mentality amongst teens during your life in the village? Or are they more privy and more self-conscious about their village reputation?

Also thanks for sharing your thoughts about the CC chairs! This will help me further tidying up my Buy Mode objects. If I'm in game again, I will make screenshots of couches and tables too.

I still struggle with game crashes due to having too many object meshes (downloaded some clutter), so I have to clean up more furniture. Can you help me out selecting which objects would suit my theme?
Screenshots of seatings (except beds): https://imgur.com/a/rDgsDIQ

Any additional thoughts @simsfreq ?

CAS family
I think you already mentioned that it was the only item that you could find. Apparently, the community needs more European CC creators.
Cleansing bottles: Imho, there are some small differences between the pictures that you found and the bathroom of your CAS family. There is more space between the toilet and the items. The toilet brush is placed in a way that potential water drops from the toilet brush would end up on the floor and not on the items. And it looks like the two rooms do not have a better place to store the items (no cabinets in the first room, only wall shelves in the second room). With these differences, I can imagine that items are placed on the floor. In fact, I saw a few rooms like that - mainly public toilets in restaurants or other locations where you have proper walls and not just toilet stalls (I hope this is the correct term).

MFH apartment
350 inhabitants definitely is a small village. I believe you that this apartment house exists. I just wanted to point out that it is rather exceptional to have such a house in a small village. Every village has a few exceptional buildings (due to size, style, age, materials etc.) so that it is not a problem if your Veronaville also has a few exceptional buildings. Just ensure that you have enough normal, rather boring buildings so that the overall picture is fitting.
Fence: There doesn't have to be a post on each tile, but once every couple of tiles would definitely be more realistic gravity-wise.
The regulations are different for each municipality so that I cannot provide you with details about Ahrweiler without investing too much time. The lot does not necessarily have to be green and with lots of plants. Any kind of material which allows rain water to drain into the ground is fine. You could use "Rasengittersteine" or the bark mulch terrain to reduce the amount of other floors outdoors. It is not only about regulations, it also is about money. The more sealed floor there is on a lot, the higher the sewage water charge for the lot owner will be. The lot owner can pass it on as additional property expenses to the tenants, but high additional property expenses make it less attractive to rent an apartment (while a usable garden would make it more attractive).
Do you have a closer picture of the metal railings? I can't see them well enough to see whether their style is one that is suitable for the outside of a private building. Apart from metal, a wooden railing also would be an option, maybe one that matches the balcony railings?
Chimney: You can locate the fireplace on whichever floor you want, but you have to place it in a very central location so that the chimney is higher than the highest part of the roof.
As I did not watch the whole video: Did it show a common basement? In my opinion, it makes no sense to have a storage room within the apartment plus a storage in the basement. Maybe the whole undefined space in the basement is used for other purposes.
Unit 3: I don't like the real floorplan, I'm sorry. In my opinion, they waste a lot of potential by having a room without window (big minus in RL) and it would have been so easy to swap bathroom and storage room. I do not really see a need to have a bigger guest bath, although 2x3 also would be an acceptable size.

ZFH
The lower apartment has two tiny rooms. The one closer to the street is supposed to be a storage (and this size seems to be realistic for a storage within the apartment when there also is a storage in the basement). The one further away from the street is supposed to be a guest bath. If you shrink the hallway, I would swap these two rooms because your sims will hardly ever go into the storage room. That way, the narrow part of the hallway would only be used by sims who want to go to the smaller bedroom.
It's quite interesting that the floorplan of the upper apartment shows that the smaller bedroom and guest bath have direct access to the staircase. I am wondering whether the two diagonal lines on the stairs shown on the floorplan of the groundfloor indicate that there is an apartmentdoor directly on the stairs (which would be unusual). If not, it might mean that the smaller bedroom on the upper floor does not directly belong to either apartment and could be rented by the tenants of either apartment. Such constellations are not very common, but they do exist.
Row houses in Germany usually have a narrow garden strip attached to it that may exclusively be used by the inhabitants of each house. The inhabitants also may decide how their garden should look like (with some limitations if they are tenants and not the owners). You can google for "Reihenhaus" and "Garten" to see some examples. More than a small paved terrace behind the house is quite unusual imho. For duplexes, the situation is the same although the garden there usually is wider so that people need less inspiration for how the garden can look like.
Antonio: I definitely would have him rent an apartment with a garden. It is common to have a swing and a sandbox for children, maybe also a wading pool and a trampoline during summer. And some restaurant owners also like to grow plants for their restaurant (mainly herbs, but some also grow vegetables and/or fruit).

Monty ranch:
I definitely like the new living room better. The sofa, love seats and living room chairs maybe are a bit too much circled around the TV. Maybe it would look better to have one (or both) of the living room chairs closer to the TV in a way that they are placed partly backwards to the TV? It's a living room. I guess, every now and then, the family will also sit there and talk to each other while the TV is turned off. The pattern of sofa etc. is rather uncommon for Germany. Light colors often are mixed with other light colors or there is no pattern at all. However, as Patrizio and Isabella chose the items, my opinion doesn't matter as I do not know what kind of patterns are/were popular in Italy.
Lamps: Is the room too dark with just one ceiling lamp? Because if not, just having the ceiling lamp would be fine imho. If it is too dark, a floor lamp in the corner with the pet bed might be an option. For the other side of the room, ceiling spotlights pointing to the cabinets might be an option. I do not think that wall lights make any sense, because they would be in the back of the sims so that the sims cause shadows in the relevant part of the room and they also only would lighten up the top of the cabinets, but the shelves within the cabinets also would be in the shadow.
Library: Do the sims walk to the living room if they want to read? If not, you might want to add a few more seats. Six bookshelves for just one chair seems to be a bit unproportional to me.
Kitchen: White/cream looks rather unusual for a 70s/80s kitchen (at least compared with the kitchens from that period that I know). The work surface of the counters look great. The stove and dishwasher look like they really are built in. I seriously doubt that toe boards are available, but if you ever find some, they might be a good addition. Does the dishwasher have a slightly lighter recolor?
Garden: When was the shed built and what was it used for in the past? Maybe a gate would fit better than the door. The shape of the carport looks great. Do you have a recolor that looks more similar to the roof color? If not, you also could try a color that looks less similar.

Village culture
There was something comparable to a "drinking shed", but only all male groups met there to drink and smoke. Once even a twelve year old boy ended up in hospital after drinking too much.
Kirchweih ("Kirmes" is a regional word and I am from another region so that it would feel weird to use it) in a village often is a quite boring event (church service, barbeque, cakes, local brass band) and not really appealing to teenagers.
There are other events and festivals which are more appealing to teenagers. It is common to drink there, but kissing without a serious romantic interest was extremely rare. Thus, I do not know anybody who kissed most of their friends.
Reputation within your own village is not really a factor that teenager take into consideration. If there is an event in your own village, people from the village will work at the food and drink stands and usually they know you and approximately know your age. Therefore, they simply can refuse to sell you alcohol if you're too young. It's easier to drink in other villages and towns.
I do not remember any parents getting drunken on such events. A few people from my grandparents' generation got drunken ocasionally. And there also was a childless medium-aged man who got so drunken that he stripped which was a gossip topic for quite a while.
Just for the record: The fact that I hardly ever saw any adults drunken at such ocasions doesn't mean that all the people behaved responsibly. It was quite common to have a liter of beer along with lunch and more beer during the course of the day. The alcohol level for most people was not too high, but the level remained similar for many hours. And there are still a few people who consider one, two or even three bottles (0.5 l) of beer after work (Feierabendbier) every day as normal. These people are used to alcohol and it would take much more alcohol until they are visibly drunken.

Seats
I will not be able to give you objective reasons for all seats and my suggestions will also be influenced by my personal taste. I'm sorry for that, but I don't think that I will have sufficient time to research whether my impression is representative for Germany.

First picture: I would remove 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12 and 15. I really like 7, 8, 13 and 14.

Second picture: I would remove 1, 11 and 12. I do not really like 9, but as a completer of an existing set, it makes sense to keep it. I really like 4 and 7 (a friend of mine had something similar that in her bedroom as teenager). Isn't there already a barstool a bit similar to 8 ingame (with other upholstery colors)? If it is similar enough for you, you might remove the CC barstool.

Third picture (I will use your row numbers, but I will start counting from 1 in each row instead of using your consecutive numbers; 1 always is on the left):
R1: I would only keep the two desk chairs.
R2: I would keep 3, 4, 5, 8, 10 and 11
R3: I would keep the 1st, 2nd and 5th set
R4: I would remove the last love seat. Is the second last one a completer set for the couch that already exists ingame?
R5: I would remove the last set. Is the seating surface of the living room chair of the third set really curved? That looks strange. But I like the corresponding love seat (especially that color) and couch.
R6: I don't like the pattern of the second set, but the mesh looks okay. I would remove the forth set.
R7: I would remove the striped set. Should the couch of the green set look that transparently? It looks weird, but I like the chair and love seat. I would remove the mattress on the floor. The last love seat looks like it also can be used as bed. That might be a good choice for a guest room.
R8: I don't like the more curved items of the green set (6 and 7).
R9: I would keep all items.
R10: I would only keep the second set.
R11: I would keep all items.

German name mod
I saw that you created a thread because you are looking for a German name mod. I searched for name mods a few years ago and at that time there was no mod that matches your request. I guess the best option is if you do such a mod yourself. As I thought about creating a similar mod a few years ago, I can provide you with some helpful links:

• Male and female given names derived from birth registrations for each year and each decade since 1890. Use the menu on the right side to select the category of your choice. For recent years, there are links for regional rankings available. You might want to have a look at the lists for "Westdeutschland". https://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/62633-2020er-jahre.htm

• Family names derived from owners of landline connections in 2002, the 1000 most frequent names, at the bottom of the page, there are links to places 1001-2000 and 2001-3000 https://wiki.genealogy.net/Die_1000..._in_Deutschland

• Family names derived from phonebook entries in 2005, all names with more than 1000 entries https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Verz...en_Deutschlands

• Male given names derived from phonebook entries in 2005, the 1000 most frequent names https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Verz...en_Deutschlands

• Female given names derived from phonebook entries in 2005, the 1000 most frequent names https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Verz...en_Deutschlands

You should be aware that the lists of phonebook entries and landline connection owners are biased for several reasons. Older people are overrepresented, young adults underrepresented and children and teenager hardly represented at all. I guess that immigrants also are a bit underrepresented. Thus, please take these lists only as inspiration and modify them according to your preferences.

Thank you for taking the time for writing a detailed reply! Meanwhile, I'm working on building more lots for Veronaville (mostly EFH), and through real-estate pictures I can also get impressions of common furniture (and I've created collection files with Build/Buy staples for German houses). Pictures coming soon.

Floorplans
Yeah, sometimes the architecture doesn't feel intuitive to me either, so if my other upcoming builds have weird floorplans, then it's probably caused by trying to recreate the real-life floorplans that don't always make sense or suit your taste. But now I'm more flexible with adjusting whenever needed to make it more Sims-approved.

Regarding 70s and 80s kitchens, I did have found multiple cream counters from that era:
* https://digit.wdr.de/entries/132485...lIl19&qt=search
* https://digit.wdr.de/entries/153059...lIl19&qt=search
* https://i.pinimg.com/originals/cc/f...61d0c8e76f3.jpg
* https://i.pinimg.com/474x/13/c7/69/...583a2187f55.jpg
Alternatively, what other colors were more common for kitchen counters so far you can recall?

Apartments in villages
While I understood that most EFH are rentals as well (but I build them as properties to make it easier to tweak in Build Mode afterward), are ZFH apartments more common in small villages, or rather Dreifamilienhäuser? Or are Doppelhäuser (duplex houses) more common than apartments separated by floor levels?

You're welcome! And sorry that it often takes me quite some time to answer, but writing the postings takes some time and life does not always go as planned.

Kitchens
The style shown on the last three links of your last posting was very common, but it is a different style than the Monty kitchen. The cream color (or sometimes also a very light brown) always are combined with wooden details. The counters do not have door knobs, but small cavities. The wooden details are everywhere - inside the cavities, as toe boards, some of the side walls of the counters and cabinets, in all gaps and open shelves ...
The style shown in the first link looks similar to the Monty kitchen, but I cannot remember that I ever saw such a kitchen. It looks cheaper than the other kitchens which makes me assume that these kitchens had to be replaced sooner than other kitchens. I only remember one all-grey kitchen (decorared with dozens of "Pril-Blumen" by the owner) of similar quality that survived until around 2005. All the other kitchens were either the style from the other three links (although I guess that it is rather a style from the 80ies, not from the 70ies) or made from solid, dark wood (from the 70ies, some still in use today).

Rentals
I guess that often depends on the age of the house and the location within the village. I can't really say anything about really old houses because the layouts vary so much that you hardly have a rule, just exceptions. In the decades after WW2, many families replaced their old houses by newer ones. These houses usually were built for three-generational families and they often have three floors (including the attic). These houses often have been passed on as inheritance at least once and some of them have been turned into apartment buildings because the heirs didn't want to use it themselves. The layout of these houses is not ideal for apartments because the stairs often separate at least one room per floor from the other rooms on that floor and there is not really space for additional walls to separate the apartments.
I have only seen the inside of houses like that that still are inhabited by the owners or, if the house was inhabited by two or three households, they all were distant relatives of the lot owners and trusted each other enough that they didn't mind if the apartments were not completely separated from each other.
Completely new houses were built in development areas in remote parts of the village, but during that period the lots always were big enough to build detached houses so that pretty much everybody built detached houses. It also was not common (at least not in my home village) to build apartment houses during that period. Over the decades, the size of new lots and the size of new houses slowly became smaller and smaller. The size of the houses mainly was influenced by offering subsidized credits for houses up to a certain size (currently the limit should be 120 m² for a family with two children).
Classical duplexes (in the village center buildings also often are built wall against wall, but these buildings were not intended to be duplexes and might be from completely different periods) only came up in the recent past when some of the lots were not big enough anymore to build detached houses. The duplexes that exist still should be inhabited by the owners and not yet be turned into apartments. The number of duplexes also is quite low because people prefer detached houses and often decide against buying such small lots. In my home village, there is a really big empty lot that is split up in two parts and belongs to two different families who don't get along with each other. There were many potential buyers for the lot because if you can buy both parts, it would be a really great lot. However, due to the conflict between the two families, no potential buyer ever got the consent of both families. If someone buys just one part of the lot, they would only be allowed to build a semi-detached house there which apparently is not appealing enough so that the lot still is empty after many decades.
Houses that were intended to be rentals directly from the beginning on are a pretty recent thing in my home village. The oldest ones should be 20-25 years old. A man with lots of manual skills, but a low pension entitlement decided to build them to have an extra source of income. He bought a small, cheap lot in a development area and built two bungalows there. I guess the bungalow style was chosen because it is quite simple so that the man could do most of the work himself. The two bungalows share a wall although I'm not sure whether you can consider the bungalows as a duplex because the shared wall is just at the narrow end of the two houses and the houses are build on different height levels (the lot was steep and levelled it on two different heights). The bungalows are inhabited by two families with young children. Due to the size of the bungalows, I guess that they only have two bedrooms each, but I have never been inside and therefore don't know the exact layout.
As these kind of buildings are very new, they have the most remote location within the village.

Kitchens
Regarding "toe boards", do you mean toe-kick drawers? If yes, I can imagine it's not common for Sims CCs. Good point about cavities as handles! The Krampft counters from BG are my go-to counters since they have a basic shape (no carved details in the doors). The objects have cabinet handles, while I often see knobs in pictures with older kitchen counters. The Retro kitchen by Mustluvcatz is another set of basic counters but with knobbed handles, but the countertops don't stick out a bit to the front and the edges have a different color.
I think the Romantic Notions or the Country/Quaint one set from Maxis is the best I could find for rustic/antique style kitchens I see now and then in real-estate objects with a late 20th century style interior.
So for the Monty kitchen, I think I'll go for an AL Darkwood recolor instead since that's easier to recreate. But if in darkwood, was the simple Krampft or rather the ornamental Romantic Nations style more common?

ETA: I just found 80s style counter recolors! https://sims2artists.com/index.php?topic=809.0
ETA2: more previews of various Maxis counters: https://nixedsims.blog/2016/04/11/counter-completers/

Objects
While I currently don't have exceeded the object mesh limit, do you have the time to take a look which tables would most likely not fit in my theme/era?
https://imgur.com/a/g41mQNn

Kitchens

No, no drawers. Counters usually have some height-adjustable legs that don't look very nice so that people usually add some wooden boards that hide the legs.
This picture shows quite well what I mean: https://i.hood.de/fit-in/850x500/fi...2/348228499.jpg
For the cream and wooden kitchens, the toe boards often have the wooden color, not the cream color.

I would go for the Krampft kitchen. Door joints on the outside of the counter doors are not that common.

The recolors and completers look great. The seasons sink in the first link, however, looks much too outdated and I would not use it in a 2000s German setting.



Tables

First picture:
Last row: Keep all
Second last row: Remove 6, 7 and 11 (from left)
Middle row: Keep all
Second row from the front: Remove 12
Front row: keep all

Third picture: The table with cabinets looks strange. If you didn't stack anything on it by accident, remove it.

Fourth picture: Keep all

Fifth picture:
Back row: Remove 3, use 4 as cabinet, not as side table (or remove)
Front row: Remove 3 and 6

Sixth picture:
Remove 2 and 5, use the others mainly outdoors, in the cellar etc.

Seventh picture:
Back row: 4 and 5 would be good clutter for girl's rooms (with some smaller items placed on top and/or next to it)
Second last row: Remove 3 and 4
Second row from the front: Remove 6, 7 and 8
Front Row: Remove 1 and 3

Kitchens
Thanks for the pictures. Then I think the Seasons/Quaint kitchen would fit better than Romantic Nations for a rural-kitchen style in AL med/darkwood.

Apartment lots
If I build apartment units without a separate entrance, I can consider using one of Inge Jones smart doors for a certain family, or a Myne door for single Sims. For apartment lots (ZFH/MFH), I make sure I pick reference buildings that were built before the 2000s, but I noticed that the apartments I found were mostly built in the 60s to 80s. For a small-scaled village (<500), I guess most post-war lots are large EFH (with possibly a granny flat) with a few lots that were converted to ZFH/MFH.
Did you mean that the post-war house replacements were built as multigen homes, or that pre-war multigen homes were renovated into some kind of apartments? Do you know how common it still was in the 90s/00s to live with two generations in one building? (be it a granny flat or a multigen lot/MFH). And was it very common it in a small village to let relatives/grandparents/starters live in granny flats, or were they rather empty or rented as B&B/holiday homes?

Semi-detached lots
A larger "village" like Windenburg could have more post-war semi-detached houses, but when I was looking up lot references from the Ahrweiler villages, I found a few oldish semi-detached homes -- one from the mid 70s , another 70s one , and a pre-war one from 1930, although this might have been built in a different year than the adjacent house attached. My assumption is that the development areas of those villages had lower size limits to qualify for subsidized credits.

Apartments

Many houses were built during that period. After the war, many damaged houses were barely repaired due to the lack of materials and money. Some years later, due to Wirtschaftswunder, more people could afford to replace these houses and, during that period, central heating systems also became more common so that many families had incentives to replace their houses to with more modern and comfortable new houses.
Yes, most of these big houses were multi-generational EFHs that were converted at a later point.
Granny flat: I read somewhere that after the war, there was an obligation to include a granny flat when building an EFH due to the lack of houses and apartments. The intention of the government was that these flats would offer cheap living space for farm helpers, low paid workers etc., but in reality most of these flats were rented to family members because the house owners preferred to share the house with people they knew. I could not find the start date and end date of the regulation when I did a quick search. Maybe you can do a more detailed search. Einliegerwohnungen were defined in the Zweites Wohnungsbaugesetz from 1956 which maybe also is the start date. The law was effective until 2001, but this cannot be the end date as I know many houses that were built before that date and don't have a granny flat. I even know (= whole layout) a house from 1965 without a granny flat. Therefore, the regulation either only was in place for a limited period of time or maybe it wasn't applied anymore once the housing shortage was solved within a region.
I meant that post-war house replacements were built as multi-generational homes, but the pre-war houses also were multi-generational. There was a housing shortage after the war and people were forced to offer some of their living space to people who had lost their homes, but the house owners usually wanted their forced guests to leave as soon as possible and definitely wouldn't have created separated apartments and increased the risk that the strangers stay longer than necessary. I even know one case where a family owned two houses in the village. They had moved to the village only a few decades before and had been day laborers at that time, but managed to buy a small farm some years later. At the end of the war, they all lived in the farm house (three generations, about ten people), one part of the family moved to the empty house so that no one else would be housed there.
90s/00s: Three-generational households still were (and are) common. Often, one child wants to take over the house and the parents and the child plus family live in the house together. There also are legal incentives for gifting the house to a child instead of passing it on via inheritance because if you pass on (as a gift or inheritance) too many possessions at once, the receiver has to pay taxes. By starting to make gifts while still alive, the possessions can be split up into several shares to avoid paying taxes. That's why older people often only have a life estate in the house that they used to own.
I don't know that many families who live in houses with granny flats so that my answer might not be representative: I don't know any family where the grandparents live in the granny flat. It is rather common that the children of the owners use it for a certain period of time around the time they become adults. In these cases, however, it often is only used as an extension of the house that provides a bit more privacy for the child whenever the child wants to have that privacy, but usually it still has access to the main part of the house, participates in family meals, has the parents do their laundry and often even still has a bedroom in the main part of the house. If a family doesn't have a child with appropriate age, they also might decide to offer the granny flat as holiday home (without breakfast). It is not too common, however, as currently no granny flat is offered to tourists and in the past, only one or two granny flats in the whole were offered at the same time. More granny flats were rented to professional athletes who didn't earn too much money with their sport. These athletes often changed clubs and preferred to rent furnished apartments. I also could imagine that the owners like to rent the granny flat to craftspeople when they are in the region for several weeks or a few months for a certain building project. As a granny flat means rather close contact between owners and tenant, many families prefer to have the flat empty than renting it without being 100 % sure that they will get along well with the tenant. As the houses are several decades old, the credits usually are paid off so that the owners don't need the rent as additional income.


Semi-detached houses
Only the houses shown in the second link are classical semi-detached houses and possibly a development area. The houses shown in the first link look similar, but are not identical. Therefore, most likely they were built by different people at (slightly) different times and they don't share a wall. The lot simply was too narrow to build the house another way. According to the description, the lot is close to a former train station which might be an explanation for the lot size.
The house in the last link is built on both lot borders and is a good example for something that I tried to describe relatively at the beginning of this thread. Many older lots are quite narrow (but often rather long) and buildings are very close or even on the lot border and if the neighboring lots are the same way, there might be no or very little gaps between the buildings. This doesn't have anything to do with subsidized credits because the size of that lot was defined a long time before those credits were offered.
The subsidized credits that I mean are offered by the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (if you want to do some research). It was founded after WW2. The limits for these credits are the same for everybody and every region (east Germany only after the reunification, of course).


Cars
Due to the end of the year, there were some articles about cars turning 30 years old (the minimum age to register them as "historic" in Germany). Most articles did not only mention cars that still have rather high values (like Porsche 911 and Ferrari 456 GT), but also cars that were used as regular cars: Renault Twingo, Fiat Punto, Opel Corsa B, VW Golf 3 Cabrio, BMW 3er Cabrio, Mercedes C-Klasse, Saab 900 and Lancia Delta 2. Maybe this information helps you to look for CC. It also might be helpful to google how many cars of each type were built because some cars were (and still are) much more common than the others.

Housing development
Very eductational post about the housing history! This inspires me to take a look at the Dutch post-war housing history for comparison.

So if I create a threegenerational household (Elders + Adults + their Kids/Teens/YA), would the Elders rather live with them in a multigenerational EFH lot? And if the Elders live separately from their Adult children, do they usually stay in the same EFH/multigen property for the rest of their life as long as they're healthy enough to live independently, or do they move to a smaller lot?

Do you know what kind of flooring is common for flat roofs? (E.g. garage extensions) For now I use concrete slab textures

Kurort village
What are your interpretations about the plots layout of this "Kurort"? (used Geoportal NRW for the screenshots) The old monumental houses (scroll down to the bottom) aren't as narrowly built as the old buildings in the Eifel villages for example, but I couldn't find much info about the history of this specific Kurort village and typical layouts of other Kurorte with my limited German skills. Also, this area hasn't been captured yet by Street View snapshots.

Kitchen CC cleanup
https://imgur.com/a/K8RmF4K
Can you help me out again picking Kitchen CCs that are worth keeping? I wonder what kind of wood ornaments and handles for kitchen/bathroom counters were common aside of Maxis' Krampft and Seasons/Country.

Updates about my hood
Currently I'm mostly focused on building new lots and managing Collection Files in which I gather common Build/Buy items I've seen in real-estate pictures. I also feel more confident improvising some room layouts a bit if I don't know the entire floor plan or it isn't Sim-friendly. Pictures coming soon

Housing development

Some of the information also was new to me, but it was relatively easy to look it up.

Most grandparents had two to four children when they were young. Most likely, one of the children plus family would decide to stay in the house while the other siblings move out and receive some money as compensation for not inheriting the house. It is really common that all three generations live in the same house until the elders die or have to move to a retirement home.
Downsizing is not really common in Germany. When people buy or build a house, they usually want and plan to live their for the rest of their lives. According to a Foucs article from 2014, Germans in average move only 4,5 times per life and that includes tenants who can move more easily, students etc.

Most such roofs are not completely flat. They have very flat angles so that rain does not cause problems. These roofs usually are made of corrugated metal or some kind of plastic (sometimes slightly light-transmissive) with similar shapes. The few really flat roofs that I know have some kind of waterproof plastic sheet with peppble stones on top. At the borders of the roof, the plastic sheet is higher and there are no pebble stones on top. That kind of roof needs some kind of drainage.


Wallefeld

Here is some information about the history of the village: https://www.rundschau-online.de/reg...n-landes-192727
The village only was a Kurort for a few decades. Apparently, the village changed a lot over time because they needed space for the public pool in the village center and a second pool close to the Kurhotel. The second pool and the hotel do not exist anymore.
As Wallefeld is very small, it is not possible to compare it with other Kurorte because they are too different. Here is a list of popular Kurorte so that you can have a look at them: https://www.weg.de/inspiration/reis...rte-deutschland Schwangau and Bad Ems should be the smallest ones with a bit more than 3000 and 9000 inhabitants.
I could not find any information about the lot layout. Thus, the following paragraph is just my assumption: I assume that in the past, most inhabitants were farmers (as it was not yet a Kurort) so that there were lots of subsidiary buidings between the houses. These kind of buildings can make insurances quite expensive, especially if they are old and contain lots of easily inflammable materials. Therefore, the owners might be interested in demolishing them if they do not need them. As subsidiary buildings often have a worse quality than the residential buildings, they are less likely to be protected and the municipality might also support the demolishing because it can be really dangerous if there are many old buildings without gaps or just with small gaps between them.


Kitchens

Counters
Classical counters are rather uncommon in bathrooms. Most bathroom sinks just are placed on the wall without anything beneath. If you do not mind downloading more CC: The Averio set has some really nice and basic items although I only would recommend very few recolors of that set (like white and cream).
Counters with open shelves or without any storage at all are uncommon so that you can remove those. For the counter with a hole in the second row from the front on the left side: Try whether you can place a stove in there. If yes, it might be a really good option for a German kitchen. If not, remove it.
Two things that are uncommon with counters in general: Two narrow drawers next to each other. It is much more common to have just one wider drawer. One counter also should have only one wide door, not two narrow ones. One counter has the door knob on the right side and one on the left side and you place two of these counters next to each other in the right order.
Last row: The counters on the right look rather familiar. The middle ones are okay, the ones on the left could be removed.
Second last row: The texture of the right ones looks really uncommon. If all recolors have that texture, remove them. The other ones also are not really convincing. The middle one with the wide drawers looks okay, but there also should be an option with a door.
Middle row: The counters in the middle look rather familiar. The one on the right with doors also looks okay, but not the one with open shelves. The left ones can be removed.
Second row from the front: The left ones look rather familiar. The one with the hole only should be used if you can place a stove inside. The right ones also look okay if you do not use the versions with the narrow drawesrs or just one such counter per kitchen. The black and white contrast is rather unusual, but maybe there are recolors without such a big contrast.
Front row: Remove both.

Stoves
Stoves that are more than one tile wide should hardly ever be used in kitchens of private homes.
Back row: 5, 6 and 7 look okay.
Middle wor: 4,7 and 8 look okay although the last one is not a gas stove.
Front row: The left looks like it is supposed to be used outside. Both stoves are too big for a regular kitchen.

Bottles and jars
Last row: Only number 7 and 8 look really uncommon.
Front row: Eggs usually are sold in boxes of 6, 10 or 20, not 12. Although I think that hardly anybody will notice this. Is the box on the right supposed to be for butter? If yes: Butter is sold in packages of 250 g which is much smaller than the box shown here.

Storage location
Potatoes and onions usually would be stored in the cellar and if no cellar is available in the garage. Carrots are stored in buckets with sand in the garage during winter and placed in the fridge during the rest of the year. Cucumbers and zucchinis would be stored in the fridge. Corn usually is sold in cans. Corncobs only are bought for special ocasions like a barbecue and do not lie around for a long period of time.
Tomatoes can be stored at room temperature. If they are harvested before they are completely red, red plastic bowls are useful to make them become red after harvest.
Eggplants, radish and kohlrabi are vegetables that you usually do not store for a long period of time. That is why I would not use them as decorations.

Fridges
None of them is suited as old spare fridge. The vast majority of Germans has rather small fridges that are built into a cabinet and therefore have a plain looking outside. I would suggest using a white mini fridge instead.
Here is a link to such a fridge: https://www.amazon.de/Einbauk%C3%BC...sc=1&th=1&psc=1
(Sorry for the long link, but it was difficult to find pictures that also show the outside of such a fridge as the majority of websites only has pictures that show the inside as nobody will see the outside once it is built in.

Urban planning
Interesting that in WF, those lots have less subsidiary buildings left than in the Ahrweiler villages, where I observed that many lots have multiple subsidiary buildings attached to a house/sub buiding on all sides. So for the lots I want to build in Veronaville, I can assume that less subsidiary buildings are left for safety resasons, giving more older lots a more detached look.

Kitchen
Is it common to store eggs and bell peppers in the garage/cellar as well when it's cool enough there? Which fridges would have a suitable shape to mix and match with simple cabinets? (some examples of fridges from a set: https://imgur.com/a/ThY29vo)
What shapes of wall cabinets are uncommon? Regarding open wall cabinet shelves, I have seen them sometimes in a kitchen, or in a bathroom. Otherwise, they're in inner or outer corners. I also found a rustic wooden plank counter set, but I don't know in which year that kitchen was built/renovated, but the remainder of the interior is mainly old-fashioned.
Aside of the stoves, would any of the Bonate or Manor House kitchen furniture be fitting for my game?

Game progress
Here's one of the post-war lots I've built: https://imgur.com/a/rgqzaqo
I've managed to clear up a lot of kitchen counter & cabinet meshes, which has created more overview in my catalogue and being far away from my object mesh limit right now . But I still have a lot of beds from my early download sprees: https://imgur.com/a/zxzevvx. Which ones are worth keeping?