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Welcome to my first Seasons/Open for Business combination Lot!
I wanted to use the Seasons fruit, vegetable and fish production to set up a home business that could maintain itself without having to rely on wholesale buying/selling, to make it feel like a real 'home grown' success.
If you like what you see, details for downloading my Lot for use in your game can be found at the end of the Story.
I wanted to use the Seasons fruit, vegetable and fish production to set up a home business that could maintain itself without having to rely on wholesale buying/selling, to make it feel like a real 'home grown' success.
If you like what you see, details for downloading my Lot for use in your game can be found at the end of the Story. Meet the green fingered hero of the Story, Gail Force.
In my sometimes questionable imagination, Gail was left §180,000 from an insignificant member of her family who died recently. She decided to put the money into buying a home with a good plot of land where she could use her gardening skills to build up a business and live comfortably off the profit. Here you can see them both together. This picture was taken in the dead of night, so there's not action in the street! On the land next to it she built this farm Shop so that she could sell her home grown produce. Here you can see the enormous greenhouses that Gail had built, large enough at the back to house a small orchard, with comfortable space at the front to be able to sustain a good amount of fruit and vegetable plants to allow for a year 'round supply for the shop. More on those later... Moving into the house we can see Gail's bespoke kitchen. Cooking is something that she has always wanted to get more involved in, but that will have to wait until later, she has a business to establish first! Getting a good nights sleep in her country styles bedroom before she gets stuck in with building up the business. While we are in the house, check out the spare room. Its set up for kids when downloaded into the game, but can be stripped out to allow for any other family configuration if needed. The last thing to show you about the house is the little conservatory that Gail added to the house she bought. Somewhere to sit in the evenings when the weather has turned too cold to enjoy the outdoors! But now, its time for business! This is the Farm Shop, furnished and stocked up with Gail's first harvest of mouth-watering fruit and vegetables, and freshly caught fish from her own lake. You'll see these in more detail when she opens the shop. Before that, Gail got herself into the local Gardening Club which gave her a 25% discount on fertilizer and seeds. When you plan to make money from your produce this makes a significant saving on their production costs. Once a member, her Wishing Well was promptly delivered. It wasn't long before Gail took it for a spin, wishing for a little cash to help her business start-up. Low and behold, §1000 landed at her feet. So she was all set and ready to go! One last visit to the greenhouses to tend to the plants. As you can see here, this crop is almost ready to go? ...as are these fruits, so its time to make some money! Opening day for Gail's farm Shop. The shelves are stocked, the sample fish are mounted on the wall and the float is in the tills. You can see that each fruit tray displays two of each of the three tree fruits, while the other trays display one of each of the 6 different plant crops.
There are a couple of other country stock items on the shelves which, like the mouth-watering quality fruit & veg, are marked up at 15% retail price. The chillers display Gail's recently caught fish, the most valuable of which are the Golden Trout at §518 before the 15% mark-up (mounted the sell for even more, §691). It's not long until a few loyal customers raise the business score enough to get quite a bit of traffic to the shop. In fact, it got to the point where Gail needed some help. I have a confession to make here though. What I *should* have done was hired some staff or invited other Sims to join the household and help out, but I didn't want the hassle. I cheated (yes, cheated) and spawned a couple of Servo's to lighten the load on poor old Gail.
If you play a similar story, I'd urge you not to cheat and plan a bit more in advance, learning from my situation here ;-) In fact, it wasn't long before I needed to spawn a couple more Servo's. You see, because the bots were running the store, I left it open 24 hours and rotated them around in the daylight to charge them. They got so good at their jobs once their talent badges started kicking in that I bought them snazzy suits and gave them permanent position on the two tills they needed to keep the lines down, and the permanent job of restocking. In case you wonder, as long as Gail keeps harvesting and fishing, the bots that stock the shelves take the stock from Gail's inventory, so she doesn?t need to keep going in there and doing it herself.
As you can see, the place ended up being very busy indeed! Even the Greenman family were calling in to buy their stocks at Gail's farm Shop, the reputation of her quality produce was so great! Eventually, and I was quite shocked at this, the shop ran out of stocks and the reputation started falling because of all the "out of stock" signs on the shelves. At this point I decided to close the shop and use the Bots to help harvest a new crop, which Gail had already started doing. And it was a bumper crop too, as she was able to concentrate on the plants while the Bots managed her shop. The other Servo's were also used during this down-time to rake the leaves and create some compost ready for the next planting. This saves on even more production cost and is a worthy exercise. They even managed to do some 'extreme fishing' to build up the fish stocks too... ...before being allowed some free time before the shop needed restocking and opening up again. Should robots be playing with water like that??? With the harvest over and the bots managing the shop, Gail found some time for herself, and chose to build up on her other interest, cooking. She learned from books and TV shows before venturing of into the kitchen. Pulling one of her recently caught Jumbo Rainbow Trout from the shop, Gail wasted no time in stuffing and cooking it. Well impressed with her efforts, Gail didn't need the option to put the leftovers away, because she ate the lot in one sitting! The rest of the Summer passed in a flash as she enjoyed some time in the pool... Putting her new found cooking skills to test... And lazing around in the sun... ...sometimes for too long! That's it! I hoped you enjoyed seeing how my Sim, Gail Force, managed to create a home business using only the fresh produce she created on her own Lot.
Incidentally, with 9 fruit trees and 24 plants (oh, and fish) she was able to turn a profit of over §12,000 with her first 2 crops!
If you would like to download my Farm Shop Lot you can do so by searching the downloads for "TSR Farm Shop" or by visiting my profile page.
Happy Simming!
/Steve
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86 Comment(s) posted so far
#77 On Jun 21, 2008 spiderpig11 wrote:
that is an amazing story very good buisness and no i dont think they should be playing with water like that did they not explode!?
#78 On Jun 24, 2008 joker52455 wrote:
Nice story! You should make a sequel
#79 On Jun 28, 2008 mmanning27 wrote:
great story!
#80 On Jul 3, 2008 DJ cicus wrote:
Really Liked it. I liked the robots
#81 On Apr 6, 2009 mpatton wrote:
This is a very good story and I enjoyed it I hope you do more stories in the future.
#82 On Apr 16, 2009 ashlee4291 wrote:
I loved this story. I have tried the whole at home business and never thought of the bots. great ideal, now i can use it. lol
#83 On Apr 23, 2009 MizLuv2005 wrote:
Really nice story!
#84 On Aug 2, 2009 damnanoir wrote:
really nice story! this is why people love eating farm food XD
#85 On Aug 18, 2009 Jennifer_R wrote:
Cute story! :P
#86 On Aug 25, 2009 anura32 wrote:
Damn good story. I love it. Not only was the story great, you helped me in an idea for my own sim family and the game. I came to know a lot more features. Thank you so much. Is there a sequel to this already or in pipeline.