I really only want the house building. I had a blast in Sims 2-4 building my dream house and trying out floor plans, optimizing flow of everyday life and just the architecture/design aspects of making it look good. Sadly they always hit limitations which took the fun out of it due to not being able to build like you wanted. Especially roofs were tricky or impossible to get to look good. And slanted roofs wasn't in any base game and I didn't buy DLC (and haven't played 4 in like 5 years+).
If someone could make an house architect game I'd so love it! Build a house for a family of 4 with a budget of X with these bullet point demands. Then get scored on stuff like usable sq footage, how well the bullet points got satisfied etc.
what you're searching for is a game called house flipper. it's on steam, and after reading your post I am 100% confident you will love it and should look it up.
Cool game and thanks for the recommendation! But the first one is only focused on renovations and while it's fun to reimagine a space I'm not at all interested in the nitty gritty of renovations. I have my own house and have done a fair bit of renovation work so doing it in a sim game would be dreadful, I've never understood the whole genre of "do menial labour but as a game!" Like Euro Truck Simulator and it's ilk.
The coming second game however talks about building a house from scratch as well which does sound promising! If the build process isn't too time consuming and smooth it might be great. So I'll for sure check that out once it's out!