Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31919
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31919
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

If you want inspiration on the interior or exterior of a character's home, then there's no reason you can't use homes that are for sale for inspiration. If the problem is simply that those web pages are only available while the home is actually for sale, then save the images and any other relevant details to your own computer for future reference. As long as you don't use them directly, but rather only to draw inspiration from, it's _unlikely_ (but not impossible; IANAL) that anyone will call you out on doing so.

Alternatively, for a starting point, consider your characters. What would their dwellings probably be like? What choices would they likely make? Start with a generic outline, and add bits and pieces that fit your characters. Are they living in the woods, in an open area, or in the middle of a city? Single-family house or apartment in a large complex? Someone who lives in the countryside in a cold climate is likely to have a fireplace, and possibly a wood cooking stove, which need to go in particular places relative to the structure of the house (because they need direct attachments to the chimney). Again in cold climates and in the northern hemisphere, there are typically more windows facing the south than the north in order to catch the warmth of the sun. The rest of the home would be laid out around those things. Then consider the kinds of decoration (more or less) they'd have; is the character a bookworm who'd have every inch of every wall covered in bookcases, or are they an artist or photographer who would be having their works on display, or are they farmers who want to overlook their fields or nearby pastures, or what? Do they work from home, and if so, what kind of workplace do they have? These kinds of things will also influence the kind of home they would prefer.

And of course, no building stands forever. So no matter what you do, sooner or later it will either be torn down, or torn down and replaced with something else. It is likely to be remodeled a handful of times in the meantime, and may well get a fresh coat of paint more often than that, possibly in different colors depending on the owner's or tenant's preferences. It's very likely that nearby buildings will undergo something similar as well.

Setting a real address for a fictional character's home is at best risky, as has been discussed by others already. One way around this could be to simply place the house at, say, an intersection between roads that don't intersect, but never actually specifying an _address_. (Short of people who live in the neighborhood and hard-core fans who will scrutinize every detail, it's unlikely that people will realize this.) Another is to use a known invalid address, but in that case you have to make _sure_ that it stays invalid. (For example, what would happen if a single lot is split in two? What happens when a street is elongenated?)

Original score: 1