Tag: My SL

In February, I wrote about the most recent changes on the home front – raising house and garden to the top of a rocky, water-bound plateau. Since then, I’ve been allowing one or two little niggles nag at me, leaving me feeling things still weren’t entirely right.

Part of this is because of my slightly insane desire to keep multiple boats and ‘planes rezzed at all times (insane, as I’ve got sufficient space to pull things out of inventory whenever I want to use them, so I don’t actually need them rezzed all the time but hey-ho); and while the re-worked moorings for them gave me the space I wanted, things were still a tad ugly. Another niggle has been with the two large expanses of billiard table smooth grass on the island, which just haven’t sat right with me.

So it was that I set about fiddling with things,  starting with the moorings, which got completely re-arranged, and then raising a part of the island  so I could extend the garden and remove some of the expanse of flat grass. The new moorings are along a single pier, with a new helipad at the far end. It still looks a bit like a marina at that end of the island, but it’s a tidier marina 🙂 .

As I’d extended the amount of space available for my clifftop garden, I set out to get some new plants.. and managed to come home with … a new house…  *cough*.

The house in question Alex Bader’s Skye Luxury Forest Cabin, an eye-catching mesh design, the main structure of which weighs-in at a remarkable 18 LI, and the entire place, furnishings and fittings included tops-out at just 55 LI. And I have to say, it is simply gorgeous.

With very modern lines, a wood exterior finish and a pastel interior that suggests the latest in eco-friendly insulation, the cabin is ideal for rural settings, and with a total footprint of 23.5 metres by 21.5 metres, it doesn’t gobble up a huge amount of land. For that you get two good-sized furnished rooms (lounge and bedroom) complete with interior and exterior lighting, and an excellent feeling of space.

The fixtures and fittings in the house are all removable, offering plenty of scope for those wishing to use their own furniture; however the range of animations on the chairs and bed are impressive, making them more than suitable for everyday use. There are some nice touches as well, such as the provided wall paintings and picture frames, all of which will take your own images and snapshots.

Obviously, the cabin has replaced the stone house I put up in February, and I have to admit, it is more in keeping with the theme of the island. I’ve modded it slightly, removing some exterior features (including the terrace rails and steps, which also meant losing some outdoor poses), and added a few others (the textures are supplied, which makes adding elements easy. As the bed and chairs have animations, I’ve kept those, but added a few items of decor from the “old” house. The overall style encouraged me to re-work the part of the island the “old” house stood upon, making better use of mesh to give a more natural feel (although I’ve retained a “lawn” to one side of the house so I’ve somewhere to put the sun loungers 🙂 ) .

These rearrangements have led to an overall fall in LI – 885 to 880 (at the moment, still looking to add more plants!) which, considering I’ve actually increased the number of plants on the land already and added another boat (32 LI) and a pond, really says a lot for the economy of Alex Bader’s mesh builds.

Overall, for an unexpected find / purchase, the Skye Luxury Forest Cabin is, in my opinion, superb if you’re looking for compact living space, and makes a great addition to his range. You can find it on the Marketplace and in-world as well.

Austin Tate opted to pick-up a copy of the Cabin and covers the snowy scene add-on for those into winter scenes. He also offers some super pictures of the Cabin in-situ – check his notes here.

We had a change recently in the little community where I now live. One of my immediate neighbours – who had been there for over two years – decided it was time to move on. As a result, her little island was up for grabs, and this being a popular location, it was long before it was snapped up.

My new neighbours – whom I’ve admittedly let to meet – set about re-working the land, and as a result got me thinking about my place.

As regular readers might know, I recently revised things at home in order to get a better fit for my burgeoning interest in SL flying and boating and to give friends room to moor their boats when visiting. While I was pleased with what I had, things still didn’t feel entirely “right”. That’s where the new neighbours come in: as a part of landscaping there island, they utilised cliff-like rock forms to assist in giving the land an elevation change, and that set a little light bulb off in my head.

Axel Bergan produces some low LI materials-enabled cliffs which are sold through Novocaine Islay under the InVerse brand. At 30×13 metres, copyable, resizeable and re-linkable and at an LI of 4 (8 if you want added vegetation on them) they represent great value. So, with my box of cliffs tucked under one arm, I set about fiddling with things.

Without wibbling on at great length, the outcome (which has taken the last couple of days to get sorted), is to flip the overall layout of the island around – boasts and planes now sit at the north end, the house at the southern end, elevated on a rocky plateau of cliffs. As my garden is important to me (I’m not at all green-fingered in the physical world, so I compensate for things in-world), that now sits between house and moorings, also slightly elevated above the latter, but sitting below the former, with a further small elevation sitting between it and the moorings, where I have a broad lawn and the helipad (the lawn allows me to indulge in a little SL skydiving).

The garden retains the terrace and gezebo, but the reworking has allowed me to add further flowers and wild plants. To link it with the other sections of the island “above” and “below” it, I picked up Alex Bader’s Mesh boardwalk set, and used that to create steps linking everything. As an added bonus, this also allowed me to add a little cliff top walk over a rocky promontory I added to the east side of the island, and include some additional piers for mooring the float ‘planes.

As a result of stunting things around, I also decided to retire the “frame house” I’ve occupied since moving to the USS regions. While I like the build and got the entire structure down to just 24 LI, I felt the repositioning of things warranted a change. So I pulled the Guest House out of my Fallingwater inspired build out of its box and set about re-purposing it. For some reason, the version I found dated from 2012, so needed a fair amount of work. Thanks to a little trimming and the used of convex hull, I reduced the initial LI from 109 to 44. With a little help refurnishing the house from Cory Edo,

All told, the LI for the “new” place is 885. When you consider that precisely 300 of that is boats and ‘planes, you can probably guess why I’m pleased with things. I might even leave it like this for a while!

As a result of expanding my selection of SL aircraft with a Beechcraft C90 and C33, both from DSA (I’ve really got this SL flying bug rather bad!), I decided I wanted to have one or other of them rezzed and ready to go at my little home island; after all, what’s the point of having something like an aeroplane (or a boat – or two for that matter) if you’ve constantly got to pull it out of your purse / suitcase / handbag / attaché case (or however you think of your inventory) to use it, when you have the space to show it off?

Truth be told, I’ve actually had an on-and-off nagging issue with the design of my little island for a while now. As regular readers may know, part of the island has been laid out to provide a stand for my PBY-6A Catalina, with a south-facing ramp to provide access to the water for take-offs. The problem here has been that the ramp led into what is pretty much a main navigation channel, while at the same time made the southern end of the parcel pretty much unusable.

Given this, I’d been thinking of re-arranging things for a while, but until the arrival of my new toys, I didn’t really have the motivation to get on with it. However, that I had been thinking of things did give me a loose idea of what I wanted to do before I started pulling things apart and gluing them back together.

First off, the Catalina stand and ramp got rotated through 90-degrees. This required a certain amount of fiddling, as the parcel is fairly narrow, so I had to spend time cutting and rotating and generally faffing with a prim to get a ramp that fit within the parcel boundary, didn’t cut too deeply into the land and which wasn’t so ridiculously steep the Catalina wouldn’t be able to climb it without grounding the hull and getting stuck.

Once done, this freed-up the southern end of the island so I could make better use of that end of the parcel. As a result, and without dragging this all out, I’ve been able to add moorings for one of the additional ‘planes (which will be the C33  Debonair by default) and a place where visitors can moor their boats without a lot of additional faffing around on my part and hanging things in the air to make space for them. The move gave also me the opportunity to widen the water basin between the north and south sides of the island, providing additional mooring space there, if needed.

An unexpected outcome of this work was a reduction in the overall LI of all the structural elements on the south end of the island; not by a lot, but enough to allow me to add to the garden while still keeping a very decent ceiling of “free” capacity on the land. At the moment I’m thinking of adding a screen of small trees to visibly separate house & gardens from my budding “airport”, to give the former a greater feeling of privacy on those days when flying and boating aren’t that important.

So am I happy with the outcome? Overall, yes. At least until the next time the urge to glue prims together and play with mesh comes over me :).