How to put a basement under existing foundations the easy way.

My daughter and I had recently been struggling with how to put a basement into an existing house with a foundation - and more specifically putting in the stairs. This proved immensely counter intuitive - with articles on the net talking about cheats or small steps down to foundation level...

None of which seemed to work. I eventually discovered how to do this correctly using just two steps. No cheats. No clever tricks. Hopefully this will save some of the rest of you the hassle.

Before we start it's important to talk about the three levels. 1. The basement level - created using the Basement tool in build mode for your house. 2. The foundation level - the area which looks like grass under your house. 3. The ground floor level - the level your sims walk around on.

Okay - so here is how you do this: 1. Use the Basement tool in the build mode for your house to add the basement. You add this by going to the foundation level and dragging out the basement shape. 2. Go to the ground floor level above the basement and select the stairs you want. Do NOT delete any floor squares (the things your Sim walks on) - doing this will cause you to create a small stair case to the foundation level. You'll notice that by default stairs try to go up. Holding shift will cause them to go down - and suddenly your stairs will go though the floor squares and the foundation to the basement below. This works for spiral staircases too.

Magic. It's that easy. Two rules to remember - don't delete ANYTHING and create the stairs at the ground floor level (holding Shift to go down).

Hope this helps anyone.

Edit: Thank you for your kind words. I'm glad I'm not the only one that had trouble with this!