Home Improvement

Some time ago, we set our big gothic castle on our land in Winterfell facing the river, with its back to the main Winterfell island. Since then, Serra Anansi has made a lot of improvements, building a village and shopping/communal area, with the arrival of the new island Winterfell Ebonshire just the latest advance.

So we decided to turn our house around, to face inward, making us more a part of the community. It occurred to us that we might seem a little stand-offish facing away. We spent a few minutes picking up all the furniture, poseballs and other items and then repositioned it all. It went smoothly enough. The castle's self-aligning script worked as it should and everything came back together as we'd hoped.

But then, we started to talk about something we'd discussed in the past ... designing and building our own. The last time we talked about it, we were too new to SL and didn't have enough confidence in our building skills to tackle it. Then the pre-fab we'd bought served our needs and there was neither a need to change nor the free prim space to experiment.

But with the old one empty and our building skills much improved in past seven or eight months, this seemed like the time to try it. we talked over what we'd like to have, then built the scale model you can see in the top picture here, and then started the actual work.

We are limited by the oblong shape of our lot, so the one idea I've wanted to try for a while -- four wings enclosing a courtyard -- isn't really feasible. It would take a square lot of about the same area that we have to make it work well. So the new one will have the same general shape and exterior dimension as the one we've had. But we're bulding this one with an atrium between the two main wings, a ballroom that can be entered directly from outside so we can host social events without opening up the more private areas to visitors, and a second-floor balcony overlooking the ballroom.

Morgana or I will post more as we get closer to completion.