I was dreading that I might have the same reaction to 4 as I had to 3. Play it for 45 mins and decide I entirely hate it. Happily that did not happen. I played 23 of my 48 hours. I made a self sim, played her for a while, got her pretty decently up the career track, made a best friend, and entirely failed at any romantic relationships for her. Slightly discouraged, I decided to give building a shot.
Building and decorating are some of my favorite things to do in 2, so I hoped I would enjoy it in 4 as well. For the first hour or so I struggled without the eye dropper tool. I had the tooltip lessons turned on, but it hadn't seen fit to tell me about my much needed eyedropper tool. Quite aggravating until I found the menu at the top of the screen. I had briefly played around with the room dragging tool, and it's a bunch of fun.
I was intrigued by the styled rooms, and I quickly found myself browsing the Gallery for interesting ones. After a quick google search, I learned how to upload rooms myself. After falling in love with the kitchen wall cabinets, I decided to make a kitchen. I went with some green industrial looking cabinets, and the rest of the kitchen evolved from there. I uploaded it to the Gallery.
To really get into building, I decided to recreate my popular Katrina Cottages. It's been a few years since I made them originally for TS2, and since then the architect has slimmed down her offerings. I had a heck of a time finding the original floor plan images for the discontinued houses. I did eventually track them down. As it turns out, a few of my houses were duplicates of each other, so instead of my original 25, I made 21 cottages. Since many of the houses are modular and they are all part of a set, I used the room push/pull tool to quickly make the entire set.
After each house, I saved it to My Library and started work on the next. It was pretty fun. I had to fix a few things with a few of the houses, and it was simple with the 'Place Lot' tool. Everything loaded quickly, and I wasn't bothered with the load screens, having came straight from TS2. Once everything was the way I wanted it, I uploaded each of the 21 little cottages. They range from 1 bed / 1 bath up to 5 bed / 4 bath. Most are under $10k, and all are under $20k. All have furnished kitchens and bathrooms, but nothing else. They are all on the small 20 x 15 lot size. You should be able to find them either by #katrinacottages or my Origin ID Phaenoh.