Two more things I want to add. I'm just full of information today.
If you have showtime, there is a bed that came with that expansion that is cheap and has a sleep value of like 6 or 7 and it's probably one of the best beds you can get in the beginning. Like I said, it's cheap and it's a full bed so two people can sleep on it.
Another thing is in my dynasty I never accept less than a masterpiece sculpture and there's a way I make sure to get this done for each life stage. I do this using a little MOO (MoveObjects On) Magic
First off: There are several quality types of sculptures: Good, Great, Brilliant, Masterpiece.
When you have a sim that can do ice sculptures, what I do is buy several sculpting stations. Example: I'm using 12 so that Artie can use 4, Reka can use 2 and then Prim tries to sculpt ice sims on the other 6. I have them set up in 2 rows of 6 with a space & a half between them.
I queue up Prim to Sculpt Apollo 6 times on each of the empty sculpting stations. About 3 seconds after he starts posing, I hit the action in the queue to cancel it. If done with exact timing (and it takes practice and even then I still do it wrong), the ice block will pop up but she won't start sculpting it and she'll move to the next sculpting station. As soon as I cancel the 6th action, I got into buy mode and put on MoveObjects on. I then move the ice blocks off the sculptures. This reveals the finished product. If you attempt to pick up the item, it will tell you how much it's worth. Currently with Prim being supermaxed in sculpting, a Good will be between §1000-§1600. A Great is between §1800-§2500. A Brilliant will be near §3000-§4000 and a Masterpiece will usually be §4500 and up.
So after I've picked them all up, before I got into live mode, I reverse all actions to as if I did nothing because if you don't move the ice blocks back onto the sculpture, they aren't able to be deleted and your sculptor doesn't get credit for having finished the sculpture. You have to let the game put it back or it doesn't count. So reverse all the actions and go back into live mode. If you had a masterpiece or brilliant, I usually scrap all the others and just work on that one which saves a lot of time. Otherwise you can scrap all 6 and try again.
It will take around a Sim hour to maybe get the 6 or you could do it with fewer stations. If you have your founder or second gen do sculpting, have them sculpt another elder all day long. The more Ice Sims they get under their belt, the higher value they will become. Artie has about 300 Ice Sims on his belt and his masterpieces are around §7000 or so.