House Flipper 2: Building for Beginners. No Plan Required!

When you start up Sandbox mode and click Play, you are given two options. The one you need is Edit Property, every time you play! This will give you the full Sandbox mode interface. The Play/Continue button above it is intended for custom job creators to test their properties – it gives you only the standard Story mode interface. While it is possible to build a property in Play mode, many of the powerful tools, and even some save options, are missing from it.

To fill the shortcut bar at the top of your screen with up to 9 shortcuts, simply right-click to bring up the interface, drag your mouse over a tool and press a number key on the keyboard. The highlighted tool will be transferred to the corresponding slot in the toolbar. You can repeat the process at any time to change the key binds.

Here’s toolbar setup that I find the easiest to use when building:
1. Hands. That’s where the Duplicate function is. It also makes a nice “cancel” button for the other tools.
2. Build (Wall). Its Options menu has a Change Style function, which applies a surface finish to All sides of the surface at once!
3. Delete Wall. Has two settings. You will never need to use the “Above Roof” setting if you make sure your Build tool is set to “Limited by roof” but it’s still there, in case you forget.
4. Flipper tool. Its most useful function is Edit.
5. Surface Finish tool. Drag a selection box over a surface, then cover all of it in a single click! Also applies paint.
6. Transform tool. Used for moving items and architectural elements. Also for resizing architectural elements and the items that have this function.
7. Roofing. Lets you pre-select a roof style, and build it, but not edit – that’s a job for the Flipper tool.

The shortcut for Undo is Z. The one for Redo is Y. Currently, this is for Sandbox mode only, but a similar feature has been widely requested for Story mode as well.

The Build tool makes a good measuring tape. The ghostly green bricks have little green numbers above them, showing the measurement in metres and blocks:

The item preview on the right hand side of the Store interface has a square above it, labelled “i”. It stands for “information”, and clicking on it gives you the measurements of the item in centimetres!

As you can see, the right-hand image of an item in the Store also shows its model name and item type. Clicking on either of those will automatically use them as search terms! In the example below, you can search for either all “Vanamo” items or all sink cabinets, depending on what you click.

The Options menu for the Wall tool has two settings for the foundation. In this guide, I’m going to use the Outward setting, which will give us a foundation that is raised above ground level. Inward makes it level with the ground – useful when building a garage, a driveway, a porch or a wheelchair-accessible property. Here’s a comparison screenshot:

The first thing you should build in your house is what I like to think of as a “seed” – a rectangular piece of foundation that will eventually become the floor of your hallway.

Press G to turn on Fly mode, go up in the air and pick the point you wish to build from. Bear in mind that, since it’s going to be a hallway, you will probably need to leave space for other rooms on both sides. Put the Build tool in Outward mode and build the “seed”. My experimentation has shown that 15 blocks by 9 blocks is a good size for it.

Next, build your first wall – the one that’s going to be the template for all the other walls in the house. Build it along one of the longer sides of your “seed”, so that it’s 15 blocks long. Build all your downstairs walls on the ground, not the floor, to ensure that you are not losing any floor area. Make it 13 blocks high, so that it’s 12 blocks high from the floor level. As each in-game block is 20 cm, the wall is going to be 2.4 metres tall – the most commonly used ceiling height in real-life residential buildings. You can make it higher for larger, fancier houses, but making it lower is probably a bad idea.

This is the end result of this stage:

Purchase your staircase and place it next to the “template wall”. Before buying, pick the “Flat” setting for your “bottom”, for ease of measuring. Make sure the bottom of the staircase is on the same side you want your entrance door to be.

A good width for the staircase is 1 m. or 5 blocks. Once you’ve adjusted its height and length to your liking (you might want to use the Transform tool as well), edit it with the Flipper tool to pick the “bottom” option you prefer. They are the same for all staircase models.

Options:
– “Slanted” is very diagonal at the bottom, maximising the space underneath. Such stairs are often used in village properties, or in basements, as they look a bit unsightly.
– “First step flat” is the design used in most homes, so it looks the most familiar.
– “Flat” looks like a right-angled triangle, so no space underneath. However, the bit under the stairs functions like a wall.

Now that your stairs and your first wall are in place, it’s time to expand your hallway. Extend the floor in any direction until it is the exact size and shape you want it to be.

Next, put in all the furniture pieces that need to stand on the floor! If something doesn’t fit, extend it some more.

Once you are happy with the size of the room and the way everything fits, surround it with a “baby wall” – a border, 2 blocks high from the ground and 1 block high from the floor. If you are putting in one of those weird 2-legged hallway tables, make sure the “baby wall” behind it is 3 blocks high from the floor, or you wouldn’t be able to place it. Later, you will grow those walls to the height of the “template wall”.

Decide where you want to place your exterior door and your interior door(s). Place them on top of the “baby wall” first (see screenshot below), then delete the first row of blocks from underneath them and move the doors down onto the floor. They will be functional even before you build walls around them!

Options:
– Exterior doors in HF2 are 1.2 m, or 6 blocks wide for the standard ones, 1.6 m, or 8 blocks wide for the wide ones and 2.0 m, or 10 blocks wide for the doubles.
– Interior doors – 1.0 m or 5 blocks standard, 1.8 m 9 or blocks double.
– Door frames with no door have widths of 5, 8 and 9 blocks.

Build the floor to the required size and the “baby wall” around it. The method is the same as before, except the wall has to be 3 blocks high from the floor for a bathroom or 5 blocks high from the floor for a shower room. Here’s a screenshot demonstrating the minimum wall height for bathroom fixtures:

Build the floor and “baby walls” for every downstairs room. None of the kitchen, lounge or bedroom furniture has any minimum wall height requirements, so 1 block above floor level is enough. In the kitchen, you will even be able to check your cabinet alignment from behind!

Grow all the “baby walls” of your hallway to their full height – the same height as the template wall you’ve built earlier. This includes building around the doors you’ve already placed.

Turn the Fly mode on. Fly up and build the hallway ceiling. Turn the Fly mode off again to land on the ceiling, then use the Delete Wall tool to delete a rectangular piece of the ceiling above the staircase. The deleted piece should be the same length and width as your staircase. So in our specific case – 15 blocks long by 5 wide.

Grow the walls around the rest of the downstairs rooms, the same way as before.

Go inside the house and put in the windows. Make sure they are set to “Windowsills On”.

Build the remaining downstairs ceiling/upstairs floor. Build the outer walls of the upstairs level, so that it’s enclosed on all sides.

Make a stair landing at the top of the stairs. Make at least 1 m. (5 blocks) of space horizontally between the top of the stairs and the door or wall in front of them. Extend the length of the landing to one or both sides to make an upstairs corridor. The width of the corridor and the landing should be the same throughout. Here’s an example:

Turning the Fly mode on and off as required, build the floorpan of the top floor just like you did before – put down “baby walls” first, and only extend them to full height once the layout is final.

Once the rooms are built and furnished, fly around outside the house, putting in the upstairs windows. Make sure the windowsills are On and put the windows in with the sills Inside the house. Your house will look much better if the upstairs windows are the same size and style as the downstairs ones and are aligned with them – that’s why we are putting them in from the outside, rather than indoors. Once all the windows are in, you may turn off the windowsills if you don’t want them.

Turn the Fly mode on. With the roof on the default, Hip setting, stretch it from a corner across the entire building, making sure there’s No overhang.

Fly through the roof, so that you are underneath it, to see what the ceiling looks like. Fly back up again and edit the roof with the Flipper tool to experiment with different roof styles, until you find the one you like best.

Once you have picked your roof style, use the Transform tool in Resize mode to give your roof an even overhang on all sides. Two clicks of the horizontal arrow seem to be the optimum, like in this picture:

Make sure your Build tool is set to “Limited by Roof”. Unless you are making an attic, extend your upstairs walls all the way up to the roof.

Options: The different roof styles are as follows:
– “Hip”. The default style, and the easiest to work with. The pitch is best left at the default setting of 6, although anything from 6 to 10 doesn’t look too ridiculous. Doesn’t seem to be a good style for attics – a storage loft at most – as it has 4 sloping surfaces.
– “Gable”. With only 2 sloping surfaces, this is a good style for attics. The pitch may be anything from 1 (flat) to 21 (A-frame lodge).
– “Half-hip”. Gable at the front and Hip at the back. Unfortunately, the roof decides for itself where the Gable side should be, always on the longer side of the building, so you might need to rotate it.
– “Sloped”. One half of a Gable. Go ahead and stretch it over the entire building if you are feeling slightly mad. Sensible people use these for porches.
– “Hip corner”. A Hip roof for a corner. See Sloped description above for usage.

That’s it! You’ve built your house. Now you can apply the surface finishes, finish furnishing and decorating it, stick a little roof above the door and make a porch, set your Wall tool to the Inward setting and proceed to build a garage or a driveway… The only limitation is your imagination!