Words Marvi Torres
Deal with real estate in a more agreeable way. Instead of calling up agents who will eulogize the view in order to sell a run-down haunted house, why not draw your own house? Draw a House (www.drawahouse.com) started as a small neighborhood in cyberspace, but now hundreds of thousands of Internet users have moved in and they have created a nation full of dream houses.
Draw a House provides land for the construction of homes. You start out from scratch. The first page displays a blue background, a green foreground, and a dotted perspective line. Instructions will walk you through: from drawing the house frame, adding in the details like the doors and windows, planting the trees in the garden, to moving in by drawing a self-portrait. All the drawing is done through the built-in Flash window.
A hand cursor serves as the tip of the pen. The strokes depend on your dexterity with the mouse. There are no buttons that will help draw straight lines. If you want to draw a line, steady your hand, and move the mouse across your desk.
That's not a very hard thing to do, but the challenge is to draw slanting lines and symmetric arches, unless you are willing to end up with a boxy roof and square windows.
If everything in your house turns out unspeakably ugly, there's always the view to shift everyone's attention to. Draw a House includes a step in which you can add a garden to your yard. In the end you are given a palette to paint your house, making the site a grown-up, online version of the good ol' coloring book.
When you're finally done painting and furnishing your home, you have to answer a quiz in order to analyze your personality based on the house you made. Questions on the occurrence of straight lines, colors, flowers, and many others
somehow determine what kid of a homemaker you are. After that, you can save your house, and it will be included in the gallery.
There are thousands and thousands of houses to browse through. There are renditions of the house of the old woman who lived in a shoe. There are submarines and space stations. Old mansions with bats flying around the chimney are so well drawn you'll wonder if the owner drew directly on the monitor. There are pineapple houses, upside down houses, castles underwater, and rabbit holes.
The best thing about the Draw a House neighborhood is you can choose your neighbors. No noisy, rock-playing punks, and no prudes to stop them anyway from an all-night party. Here, you can invite your friends through email to draw a house right next to yours. You can name your houses and your street. Then you can visit it later and appreciate how wonderful it must be to live in Memory Lane.
