The McNamera Legacy

[Devin]

I'm going to be giving the legacy challenge another shot. I've recently purchased a new computer which will run the game on high settings, so I'm excited to try the storytelling again. The main reason that I'm doing this is in the hopes of helping myself to learn how to build a legacy home one step at a time. More than anything else, this is the thing which holds me back from completing legacies: My homes suck!

So I encourage everyone to please feel free to comment on the legacy with any tips or ideas you have that might help me to improve the house. I love to hear from you and I do need help with this before I can proceed with other generational challenges!

Sims will be available for download in the gallery as they are added to the family, starting with my founder. I'll include their hashtags for you to download them if you like. If you download, please comment!

I'll be including my informational posts below and then starting with the story. If the story begins to flag, I will be sure to include the pictures of the current house and notify you of the point at which it is available for download. No lots without actual walls will be uploaded to the gallery.

(Please note that there will be more generations of the house than there are of Sims, as this refers to the addition of walls and not the generation of Sims living when the house was added to. Thanks!)

Thanks for reading!

Succession Laws
Gender Law: Equality
Bloodline Law: Traditional
Heir Law: Random
Species Law: Tolerant


Key Jump Links
The McNamera Family (Info List)
The McNamera House (Info List)

Family Members
Brylee McNamera

The House
Generation One

The Chapters
Generation One, Day One
Generation One, Day Two
Generation One, Day Three
Generation One, Day Four
Generation One, Day Five
Generation One, Day Six
Generation One, Day Seven
Generation One, Day Eight

[Devin]

Generation One:
Brylee McNamera (Gallery Link, Tracker) - Founder

Generation One Chapters:
Day One
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four
Day Five
Day Six
Day Seven
Day Eight

[Devin]

Generation One (Day One):
Stage 1.a. - Angled Roof with Camper Bed, Cheap Fridge, Cheap Counter, and Cheap Shower. Cheap Easel Outside
Stage 1.b. - Toilet added inside.
Stage 1.c. - Sink added inside.

Generation One (Day Four):
Stage 1.d. - Stove added inside.

[Devin]

Brylee McNamera, Founder (Young Adult)
Painter Extraordinaire
Creative, Art Lover, Foodie

Career: Painter (Level Three: Hungry Artist)

[Devin]

The House, Generation One (Outside)



The House, Generation  1.a. (Inside)



The House, Generation 1.b. and 1.c. (Inside)



The House, Generation 1.d. (Inside)

[Devin]

This is Brylee McNamera. She's a young adult just starting her life out in Willow Creek. She's wants to be a painter extraordinaire and she loves art, is creative, and enjoys good food (foodie). At the moment she's a little bit scared about being the founder of a legacy, because it means that she can't cheat to make sure that her food quality is high and she's going to have to sell all of her wonderful paintings in order to get herself established in town.

She started out with this monstrosity on the lot. With nothing else to do with it, she added it to her inventory. What's the point in just having a giant coat of arms on an empty lot, after all?

Watcher Note: The reason that this goes into the inventory is so that the sims suffer the consequences of having purchased it (bringing the amount of money they have to start with down), but also the consequences of owning it (increased bills) so that the playing field is more level. It goes into inventory rather than being kept on the lot because this doesn't allow the Sims to make use of its benefits (mood boost).

The first thing that she does is to look for a job. Brylee takes on in the painting career, as her aspiration is to become a painter extraordinaire.

Watcher Note: Over time the Sim can earn more money just painting than by going to work every day. However, the most money to be made from painting comes with the best easel, which you can only get by working your way through the career. It makes the most sense to get involved in the painting career in order to get higher quality (and therefore higher-value) paintings.

She sets straight to work painting so that she can get the first promotion at work and so that she can start saving up her paintings in order to sell them. Brylee decides that she will save all of her paintings for a day and then sell them at the end of the day. That way she can enjoy them while they hang on the outside wall as she paints, but she can still get the money from selling them when the time is right!

Brylee manages two paintings before the welcome wagon arrives!

The welcome wagon consists of neighbors Alice, Eric, Dennis, and Vivian. Brylee gets straight to work chatting up Alice while Vivian looks on. She discovers that Alice shares her creative trait!

Soon she discovers that Vivian shares her Foodie trait! These are going to be good neighbors for Brylee!

By the time the event is over, she is friends with Alice, Vivian, and Dennis (but hasn't met Eric, who stood at a distance from the others). Way to go Brylee!

Afterward, Alice and Dennis come back to chat with Brylee while she paints for her job.

It's getting to be time to call it a night, so Brylee heads inside to make herself some garden salad. It's her only option considering her complete lack of a stove (and no room to add one into this tiny house at the moment), so she makes herself a salad. Surprisingly enough, she doesn't make any of the common mistakes and there's no earwax in this one! Way to go for a first cooking experience, Brylee!

The salad is surprisingly good, and it meets even Brylee's foodie expectations!

She takes the salad outside to tell her friend how well it went and to chat with Alice for a few minutes before getting ready for bed.

It is now the end of the first day and Brylee has managed to add a toilet and a sink (for washing dishes) to her tiny house. All in all, a good first day for a legacy challenge!

[Devin]

The next morning, Brylee wakes up with plenty of time to get herself into a good, inspired mood before heading to work. She's pleased this morning to have both a toilet and a sink, something that her earnings from painting have purchased for her!

This means that she can clean up last night's dishes and this morning's breakfast before she heads to get a shower before work.

Then it's off to work!

She arrives home in a good mood, but without the first-day promotion that the watcher had hoped that she would get. That's alright! Brylee sets straight to work on finishing the painting she'd begun that morning.

Watcher Note I don't like to push my sims too hard at work, especially when there isn't enough to entertain them and get rid of their tense moodlets when they arrive back home, so I didn't make her work hard for that first day of her new job. I will later on, when the promotions are harder to get and she can afford a very nice television!

At the end of the day (before bed time), Brylee has one medium painting and two small paintings to sell. There's nothing new to add to the house today (seeing as there isn't any room inside of it), so she heads to bed satisfied that she's done a good job and that she has work in the morning.

Watcher Note: I'm sorry for such a short chapter, but my Sims don't tend to do anything on the days that they work. Work takes up so much time in the early days that there's nothing else to have them do except their homework and taking care of their basic needs. Her friends keep inviting her out to do things (Get Together) but she doesn't have time to go with them. So much like real life <sigh>

[Devin]

When Brylee arrives home on the second day of work (with a promotion this time!) she sets to work cleaning up the house. It's amazing how quickly things can get dirty when you're making two garden salads a day!

Afterward, she sets to work making it dirty again by making herself yet another garden salad. These may be boring the Watcher, but Brylee loves them!

Then it's time for some more painting! This is not only homework, but it helps her to earn some more money.

At the end of the day she has three paintings, has completed her homework, and sells them for §407. She is now at Level Four painting skill and is an Art Book Collator!

[Devin]

The next morning, Brylee called her friend Dennis for a chat before she got ready to head off to work. It was her weakest relationship and she wanted to get to know him better, but she also needed a boost to her social motive.

She headed outside after that so that she could start working on the first of her paintings for the day. Since these are the majority of her income, Brylee likes to work on them as often as possible. After all this is how she's going to build her home and therefore her legacy as well.

The painting wasn't finished before she had to head to work, but Brylee left in a good mood eager to get to the job. She seems to be enjoying it, but the Watcher also isn't pushing her too hard. Things will probably change as she rises through the ranks, but as an Art Book Collator, it's not that hard.

She arrives home hungry, but otherwise in a good mood and set out to make her daily dinner salad. She's been eating them twice a day for the past few days and Brylee is clearly getting bored with the food that she's been eating. As a foodie, she wants to try different exceptional foods!

With some of her earnings, she purchases herself a new stove and places it to the right of the front door. It's not inconvenient due to the size of her tiny home, but she'd prefer to have just a little bit more space!

After her last dinner salad, Brylee heads outside to finish up her painting "homework" for the day. She hopes that she'll get her next promotion the next day!

At the end of Day Four, Brylee had three paintings, which she sold for §403. It's a little bit less than the previous day, but soon she'll be able to sell to the gallery instead of to collectors, and this will increase!

[Devin]

Brylee woke up bright and early the next morning. She wanted to start working on changing her schedule a little bit to give her more time for making her paintings count. She'd be painting no matter what, but it felt better to make them count for work by doing them after she'd gotten her promotion rather than doing them in the morning. Besides, today should be a promotion day! She wanted to make the most of it!

The thought of the new stove thrilled her. It provided her with more options for different meals that she could cook. As a foodie, she wanted the opportunity to try different things, and the salads had gotten old in just four days of eating them twice a day. Morning meant breakfast, and for the first time she wouldn't be choking down greens! Brylee reached for the eggs so that she could cook herself some scrambled eggs for her first breakfast.

It went surprisingly well. She didn't burn the eggs and they didn't stick to the pan the way that she'd anticipated. Perhaps all the work making those salads had paid off. If nothing else, she'd gained some cooking skills from all of the chopping and tossing that she wouldn't have had otherwise. Brylee was surprised that she managed to get through it without any disasters, as she'd been afraid of setting her meager belongings -- or herself -- on fire.

After breakfast, she headed outside to start working on a painting (even though she'd previously decided not to). Tomorrow she'd get herself better on track, but for today she had some time to kill before it was time for her to head to work, and what better way to spend her time than earning some more money to add to her family coffers? She'd need enough to build a nursery before she could pass on her genetics to the next generation, so she wanted to earn as much as she could!

Watcher Note: No matter how hard I try, I cannot seem to earn money like some of my fellow simmers do. The best that I can hope for is to have a roof over the nursery before passing on to the next generation. At the rate that she's going, she'll be able to afford a small nursery before Generation Two comes into being, but there's a chance that she won't also have a bathroom. I'm working on that, but this is something outside of my skill set even after sixteen years of playing this game!

With a little bit of time to spare before heading off to work, she gave her friend Vivian a call so that she could get her social bar full before she arrived at the gallery. It would be a promotion day unless she made a serious mistake, and Brylee was excited to get moving!

Dinner that night would be a celebration. Brylee had gotten her promotion to Hungry Artist -- and she was hungry, in more ways than one! I was a good night to try some pan-fried tilapia, and Brylee was excited to try out the fish that she had in the fridge. It had been waiting for a while, and not she would turn it into a delicious meal!

While Brylee ate her dinner, Alice came over for a visit. It was nice to have some company, given that she spent so much time at work that it was difficult to plan social events with the amount of time that she spent at work. She finished up her dinner as quickly as she could so that the two of them could have a chance to chat before Brylee had to use her house as a bathroom.

Once she had finished using the toilet, Brylee headed outside to paint while Alice headed back inside to fix herself something to eat. Even if they weren't chatting, it was nice to have Alice around. They lived next door to one another, but still didn't find enough time to hang out together as much as they wanted to.

By the end of the night, Brylee had another three paintings. Their value was §872, but because she sold them to the art gallery, she earned §1076 from them! Way to go Brylee! Now we're getting somewhere!

[Devin]

Watcher Note: I had a Fraps malfunction on Day Six. I'm on a new laptop (as previously stated) and I probably hit a wrong function key and turned Fraps off in-game while I was playing. Unfortunately that means that I have few images from Day Six. I'll share what I do have and explain what happened during this phase of game play, though it was almost nothing as a result of Brylee mostly working (as usual).

Early the next morning, Brylee got up to make herself pancakes for the first time. This excited her, as it was a new food, but also a different type of food than what she'd had so far. Breakfast had become her favorite meal of the day, as it gave her the energy (and the moodlets!) to head to work in the best possible mood. Good food, combined with a thoughtful shower, seemed to be the key to success for her, and so she liked to start every day with something special.

When she got home from work that evening, Brylee set straight to work on her supper. Tonight she would have fish tacos, being that she enjoyed eating fish and hoped to one day marry a man who would bring it home fresh to put in the fridge for her. It seemed some days that marriage was a long way off with the long hours that she put in every day, but Brylee kept hope that she'd find the time off to meet the right man.

After the dim light of her pseudo-home's interior, it felt good to get outside and work on her painting. Her skill had increased rapidly and she would soon reach level six. Unfortunately, her paintings didn't reflect her skill level, and Brylee still wasn't earning as much as she had hoped. It was difficult, but she tried to be secure in the knowledge that her next promotion would bring with it the new Easel that she'd been promised and with it, higher quality paintings. Excitement kept her going as she finished three paintings for the day and sold them for §851 to the gallery. Not as good as the previous day, but it was nice!

She hoped to get her next promotion the next day and that it would allow her to start painting her quality -- and therefore higher value -- paintings. Brylee went to bed to dream of her future success.

[Tboy002]

Great start! I'm looking forward to your next chapters 

[Devin]

Thank you so much! I feel like I'm getting into the swing of it now!

[Devin]

On Saturday morning, Brylee woke up early to get ready for a terrific day. It was the last day of work before she had two days in a row off, and though she didn't expect to get her promotion today, she knew it was going to be a good one. Something told her that she'd get the opportunity to get out of the house for the first time that night! With all of the social invitations she'd been getting (and having to turn down), it went without saying that there would be something for her on the days that she had off. Brylee couldn't wait for that night, and as she woke up, she was already thinking about what it could be like to actually hang out with her friends.

She made herself a breakfast of scrambled eggs -- something that would go light on her tummy in case the excitement got to be too much for her -- and settled down on her bed to eat. Soon enough she'd have a proper kitchen, with a real dinette and an actual dining room! If she worked hard, then she would be able to see it before she passed her legacy on to the next generations. It wasn't any fun to sit on her bed and eat her meals, and what she longed for was a proper table. It would have to take a back seat to the bathroom and the nursery though. Brylee added it to the list of things she would have to do in order to get her home set up.

Brylee headed off to work in a fine mood, though her thoughts were more on what she would do that night than they were on what she was going to do with her day at work. It was the wrong attitude to have, and would ultimately result in her not performing as well at work as she had originally hoped.

When Brylee got home that evening, she set straight to work on her usual task of painting, only this time she did it with a goal in mind. She'd bee hoping for a while to create three emotional paintings, and seeing as she was in a flirty mood following an nice steamy shower, she thought she ought to take advantage of that to create her flirty paintings. Three would earn her daily pay and it would complete her homework, so she painted three flirty paintings, each with an emotional ambiance of four. It could have been better, but Brylee was pleased with her initial efforts by the time that she was finished and the paintings were hanging on the wall. This left her feeling confident as she set out to make herself some supper.

Tonight she'd be having some spaghetti. It wasn't the most healthy of meals, but she loathed the idea of giving in to simple sandwiches, no matter how easy and available they were. Her mind was buzzing with plans for the next two days when she wouldn't be working.

She didn't have to wait that long! Dennis Kim called with an invitation for her to attend a party going on at the Bluffs. Excited, Brylee headed out to meet him there.

Her first party! Brylee was confident that things were going to go well for her, and the fact that she'd painted three good emotional paintings right before starting her dinner didn't hurt her mood at all! She'd left the food on the counter and had come out hungry in the hopes that there would be some kind of food at the party, but she couldn't immediately find any. Dennis seemed to have his own things in mind and so Brylee set off to do what she'd been hoping to do from the start: To find herself a mate.

Unfortunately there were no eligible males at the Bluffs.

Watcher Note: For two straight days of game play I've been thrown YA females but only teen or elder males, neither of which are eligible for this challenge according to my personal rules (which include every effort to get them their aspiration and to the top of their careers before they die). Ugh!

So she trekked to the DJ booth and got herself set up to dance. Why not? That was where she met Jade Rosa, of Partyhuis. It wasn't exactly her type of club, but Jade was pretty and sweet and the two of them hit it off almost immediately. Brylee enjoyed making friends, even if she didn't have a lot of time to spend with them, and it was nice to be able to add to her list of friendships. Some might say that she racked them up like they were notches on her belt, but Brylee made an effort to call her friends when she had the chance and wasn't working too hard. Friends meant the world to her, and she'd make Jade a new friend soon enough!

Before long, they were joined by Moira Fyre and Liberty Lee. Brylee was drowning in friends, and she didn't know what to do with herself. Liberty was the easier friend, in spite of her general awkwardness, and Brylee took an instant liking to her.

Brylee arrived home hungry and tired, but happy. She finished making the earlier spaghetti, ate it, and tucked herself into bed. It was hard to believe, but she still had two days off in which to find herself a mate, get married, and start on the second generation!

It all seemed so rushed, but she'd begun to accumulate money more rapidly and before too long she'd have enough for both a bathroom and a nursery. It was the height of excitement for Brylee!

It was dawn before Brylee went to bed, so she would sell her paintings the next day. The combined value of her emotional paintings (flirty) was §814, or §975 at gallery prices. She wasn't exactly rolling in dough (yet) but she would be soon enough!

[Devin]

After breakfast the next morning, Brylee headed to the museum so that she could view paintings for her aspiration. She met with Liberty Lee there, and they chatted for a while before going their separate ways. It wasn't long after that when Brylee met the first "eligible" man in town! His name was Niel Sun and he was (in her not so humble opinion) gorgeous. Alice looked on while she introduced herself to him, a knowing look in her eye. She should have been Brylee's first warning, but she chose to ignore the niggling in her gut.

Niel seemed to like Brylee, and Brylee sure did like Niel! They chatted for a few minutes while looking over the art in the museum.

He only became irritated with her when she discovered that he was a kleptomaniac. Brylee said that it didn't matter to her because she had so very little for him to steal, but he didn't seem to be buying it at all. She did everything she could to brighten his mood, and soon they were laughing and joking with one another again, well on their way to becoming friends. It might have gone better if she hadn't asked him if he was married. Of course he was! The only young adult male in the entire world and of course he was married. Too many thirsty women in the world, all looking for the man of their dreams. It figured that several would hit on the same man!

Brylee headed outside to partake of some franks and beans which had been left out, feeling sorry for herself about her marriage situation. She only had the weekend to find Mr. Right and to get started on the next generation. How was she supposed to do that if she couldn't even meet a man in the right age group?

Later that night, she met up with Neil in Windenburg. They chatted some more and became friends.

He was receptive to her flirtations.

But things got awkward when she asked if they could exchange numbers.

It seemed that Neil was the only young man in the world and that he was also married. Brylee would try again the next day to find someone, but if she didn't get on it soon, she was going to risk her legacy dying out with her!

She headed home with little hope for the next day...

Watcher's Note: I hate being a homewrecker of a watcher, but Brylee needs a mate and the public lots are only generating Sims from Willow Creek and Windenburg with very few townie sims coming up at all!