Awesome house! Really love your choice of natural wood and bright pops of color. The garden really looked "zen" and very peaceful.

I'm glad you liked it!

I tried using this house. Sims can not get to the second floor, where the kitchen is as they can't even use the stairs. Also, outside you can't move anything around or even place a grill outside. So, this is not a workable house. More for show rather than be modified to work for sims.

I play tested it in my game before importing it. I then added an "ignored floor" marker on the "false floor" between first and second, because I was tired of seeing the empty floor everytime. The side effect of this marker (which is traditionnally used for ignoring floors in apartments buildings) is that you can't modify easily the exterior. I forgot to state clearly on the description that I had used this marker, but the error code you get when you try to modify the exterior is pretty much used only in this case so finding out a tutorial on how to escape that building restriction is really not that hard.

I don't understand about the stairs, since it worked perfectly when I play-tested. It may be a side effect of the marker too (since it's actually two stairs in a row, if the Sims ignore one of the floors, they can't use it?). I have never had this happening in one of my builds before but it doesn't seem farfetched. I should have play-tested it again after the addition of the marker (but I added the marker in the first place because it was annoying me during the test ^^).

So, to make it workable you can do this:
*code: testingcheatsenabled true
*code: buydebug
*go to the empty floor and delete the marker.
You can then modify the garden all you want and use the stairs. I'll try to find time tomorrow to play the game and if my test-Sim can't use the stairs, I'll import a new version without the marker.

I have tried this now after taking the marker out and still have the same problem. When that didn't work I suspected the halfwalls used in between floors was the problem and I even tried taking off everything but the ground floor and I still couldn't build a second floor because it kept saying 'ceiling too low', so I don't know what the problem is. I'm out of ideas but I just wanted you to know so you could make it workable so sims can actually use the kitchen and all.

This month has been totally crazy. I managed to find time to play the game two weeks ago and tested the house again: everything worked. No problem whatsoever. But then I tried to import the house from ModTheSims and there it was: no way to go upstairs. So, I'm not sure what the problem was in the first place, but I did a new export of the play-tested house, without any marker. It should work.

For your problem with the halfwalls, it's because deleting the walls is not enough to have again "normal" height for this floor. Once you have used CFE to change the height, you need to use CFE again to undo it. So the "ceiling too low" warning is normal.

Can you tell me if the new version is working?

I love the repeated concrete pergolas throughout the build.

Just tested and all is fine! Thanks for going back and fixing it because its a great house and I'm excited my sims can live here!

Yay! \o/
I much prefer when my builds are working because I didn't spend all that time just for it to not be used.

I could tell you put a lot of hard work in it, so I knew you'd want me to be honest from the get go so you could fix it. And thanks so much for the lovely creation!