One of the things I virtually always do when making medieval/fantasy lots is include the oars and/or cricket bats wall decorations in the kitchen- in my head the plain wood versions look close enough to a wooden peel for taking bread or pizza or whatever out of a hot oven, and it's to the point where it makes perfect sense TO ME, but it got me thinking... is it something that anyone else would have the slightest idea what I meant by including those objects, and probably more interestingly, are there OTHER objects that other creators (mis)use in a similar way?

I am going to need a photos, as I have not the foggiest what you mean about oars looking like bread?

I think some things work and other things, well they only work for the person who thought of them. I know I have downloaded lots and scratched my head over something that I know was meant to be clever but I couldn't even figure out what it was representing. It's possible I may have done it myself.

The oars, definitely! They look like an old fashioned bread paddle.

Haha I remember the photo of Johnny and Ophelia "at school" in the Specters(? Or Smiths?) album. Maxis used fridges to represent lockers so that's what I use to do when I built schools back when it was just the base game.

I'm not very creative so that's about all I can muster up.

I've gone creative with both CC and EAxis items plenty of times. A few of my examples are from back when I had absolutely no meshing skills, so I had to make do with what I had.

Broken coffee cup - not sure what I used for the "coffee", but the "mug pieces" are shells. I think they were both CC, though I'm not 100% sure since it's been a while.


The sea stuff/algae and a puddle can make do as "plant stuff" for a knocked-over plant.

Very creative @simmer22 maybe that is pet kibble? Hopefully they learnt not to put real plants that can be reached in a toddlers bedroom!

Thanks @simsample now I am getting the oars. I thought Zar had said they were bread. They do make good bread paddles.

If I can shout somebody out, there's a guy on YT "VanDionysus" that does TS2 builds who employs that decorating tactic. Like using the Gustav Klimt looking painting as a holy painting for a cult, the pet collar rack in a "woohoo" shop, or one of the colored table lamps from NL as glowing alien residue in a crater.

I've gotten some mileage out of the Bella Squared painting, either as part of a holy shrine in a church,

or a boardwalk fortune teller machine/shooting gallery.

Combining the AL pipes and pond fountain to simulate city construction


Others I've done would be using move_objects with coffee tables to simulate a pallet, the corkboard collage as a coffee shop menu, and clumping the small cereal boxes on a shelf behind a register counter to simulate a cigarette display.

Loving this thread ! Thanks for starting it, Zarathustra !!

I don't have any pics to share atm, but I'd downloaded a factory a while back that used light brown clothes dressers as cardboard boxes.
They might have used some slanting hack objects (90 degrees or less ?) to make some of them appear tilted and laying down ?

@Tleilaxu3 I used the dressers as boxes a few years back on a lot and Zar asked about it, probably using it on that factory lot.

I hit the funny button because I don't know why it makes me laugh to see an object that reminds me of another. xD When I download other people's lots or neighborhoods I love to see how clever some people can be.

I consider the burglar alarm to be a master electrical panel where they can also control the heating system. I put it in a staff room on commlots.

In the same vein, I often use the burglar alarm as an apartment intercom or a keypad.

^ Same here - it looks quite like an intercom or control panel.

Posing and effects can also be done creatively.
First one is the "climb out of crib" animation (it's a long animation with several possibilities - I used it at least one more time for this series of pictures). The "flour" effect in the second one is from some sort of "splash in..." item (I can't quite remember which one I used, could've been a CC item, possibly sand?), which creates the desired effect combined with the right timing and a tilted OMSP.





Also, I hardly ever use the sun lamp or the star/galaxy wall+floor, but when I needed an "outer space" for my tiny aliens...



Or using various items for a makeshift baby-size beach (ingame rocks, plants, walls/floors, step-stones, "sea", plus a few CC toys to fill it out - I especially like the "palm trees" in the background, which are pond plants).

I wanted this re-creation of the mall in Silent Hill 3 in my hood, but wasn't sure if I wanted to take on all the CC that came with it, so I rebuilt it myself and used it as a blueprint. Anyway, since there's a metric buttload of shopspace to fill, I learned to use one of the siding wallpapers as a makeshift shutter door:





I suppose it's more realistic this way, anyway.

The first one is actually practical, not decorative. I have a few community gym lots and it's annoying when sims overheat so easily while working out, especially in the summer, so I use this sink as a water fountain throughout the gym so sims can get drinks of water to cool down.




This fern plant inside a column looks like a vine wrapped around (this is also how I unfortunately learned that this plant specifically doesn't work on OMSPs for some weird reason? Which was annoying, but it was decoration for a wedding so I tried not to obsess on the vines stopping halfway up.)



I have this lot that's like a teen club for private school students. It's a downtown townhouse space. The first couple floors are more formally decorated but the top floor is a hangout spot. I had this idea of students decorating the walls with found (stolen) objects over the generations. Many of these items were intended to be for specific decoration purposes, but I decided to combine them all into an eclectic collection.



This is from a museum lot I made years ago. I wanted to build a Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and they have the whole Egypt section with all the stuff they found in tombs. This is a bunch of deco items that I thought could look ancient enough to be found in a tomb.