I've been looking at some of the houses available here and I think there are a few things people could do before they upload houses.
I know sometimes we are excited about building a house and sharing it, which is good, and we want to upload it as soon as we can. Maybe it's for a contest and you want to get your entry in quick, maybe you just want to share a house that you are proud of. Whatever the circumstances, I think we can all benefit from taking the time to do a few things before we upload.
When you are finished your house, take a good look in every room to make sure you haven't forgotten anything. If all seems right, then share the build.
Once the file is in the export folder, move a sim into the house (this is of course presuming you built without occupants) and have them walk through the house and do things. By this I mean everything.. have them use every toilet, shower and bath. Have them sleep or at least relax on every bed and every side of double beds. Make them enter every room and use every door. Have them use every appliance. Make a mess in the kitchen and have them clean up.. is there a garbage close by or do they have to walk all the way to the garbage by the front gate?
Take particular note where you have things close together or have used moveobjects to place things, can appliances still be used, can sims get where they want to go?
As you do this, make notes on things that need to be fixed, and believe me, you will be surprised at what you find that you thought was fine.
Once you have done this, move the sim out and bulldoze the house. Import your shared house into the game and then delete that share file. Go back in and fix everything and re-share the house. This may be time consuming, but the end result will be a better build that people will appreciate more when they move their sim in.
Edit: Another important thing to check is how the house preforms if you have used cheats (mainly the constrainfloorelevation cheat) while building. Because the game can do some strange things because of this cheat, it is really important to not only test the house as it was built, but to demolish that house and install it again from the share file. A perfectly good looking house can have some major problems when it is installed from the share file. See this
topic for an example of what can happen.
Please don't be upset by my comments, but I have seen some wonderful builds that were really let down by the fact that they were not tested before sharing.
Norma
