UO Diary: February 26, 2015

This house design turned out completely different from anything I'd originally planned for it to be. Initially I was going to make a vendor area outside in the grass with the building itself being my personal domain. If the part of the building my character is standing on looks out of place, it's because it was added as an afterthought, when I'd suddenly decided I wanted to make an inn/apartment type establishment instead. I've spent pretty much all day looking for decorations and tweaking the design until I was satisfied. After that I went shopping and built things for this design. I had all sorts of ideas in my head. A RP-friendly establishment intended to give traveling shardhoppers or someone just down on their luck a place to keep their goods. I even had and tested a way for each room to keep their goods protected from other tenants. A secured, locked chest cannot be pick-locked. A locked chest can, but secured? No.
I even decided to include my plot directly West of this one in it. This plot would be the apartment, the other would be the vendor/community area. I customized the  other house...

Here you can see the general, if unfinished idea. A public bar/restaurant. The second floor was to have vendors. The third floor would be my character's personal apartment, complete with bath area and an area for her to do her finances.
I have never spent 8+ hours on an idea working and decorating and tweaking to fruition only to wipe the slate clean, and yet that is exactly what I did today. Both of my house plots are yet again completely empty. The ideas still swim in my head, and yet I can't get it to sit right on the plots. While customizing the second plot, I decided I wanted a greenhouse as well. But if I had a greenhouse, how in the world could I afford the time and money to run an inn? Did I even want it to be an inn or did I specifically want extended-stay people here? Was it actually going to function if someone would ask about it? Or was this all going to be for show? If it was going to function, what pricing did I need? How much gold had I already sunken into the venture?
I suffered from a virtual version of reality crashing down on me. The fact of the matter is this is Atlantic, and I do not have all of my characters built up in skill like I do on Lake Austin. I do not settle when it comes to decorating, and a lot of the time I could not find that particular craftable that I wanted. Truth be told, it's been a very long time since I've worked on any sort of decorating on a production shard. I've taken to spending my time on Test Center, where I can craft any and everything I could possibly want while decorating. While the idea of limiting myself while decorating is invigorating, it's also exhausting. After figuring out what it is I want, I have to first search for the item to see if I have it already. If I don't, I have to locate the item on a vendor, with the new but helpful vendor search option. Then I have to shell out more gold than I'd like for stuff I'm normally able to craft myself. I don't even have a character with enough Tailoring to craft beds!
So now I'm back to the drawing board. I'm thinking I will make my secondary house a greenhouse with a vendor area downstairs, and my main house will remain a private dwelling. I most likely will not be decorating the private dwelling at this point. Getting a garden started, however, will be quite easy.