Making apartments with neighbors

Sims 3 apartments with neighbors

There were a couple different people on Facebook asking about how to make apartments - multiple ones in the same building and have people move into them.  This is how I do it.  (I apologize for the initial darkness of the video - it was night in the game - but bear with it and it will be light when the neighbors arrive at 9am) In the video you will see it's a case of trial and error.  In the end, the apartment building became a "house" but still functioned as apartments. In another case in the same world, I have a place labelled as an apartment and has three households living there, but I have control of all three households, so basically they are the same household but three distinct, unrelated families. 

I'm pretty sure that I could switch households in the example shown in the video below, change to apartment, and switch back to the household; however, if I recall, doing so would give me control over everyone. Therefore, if you want neighbors you have to get to know, this is the only way I know how to do it.  If you have a different approach, please share it with me. The video is about 11 minutes long.

I also forgot to mention that pets are problematic: you can lock them out of places, but you can't specify them for a door.  If you have a pet, you might want to put their food dishes, toys, etc. in the common areas.