Objects on Lot Appear as Silhouettes

[puzzlezaddict]

@Stardust547  I've never seen a tutorial that covers exactly what you're asking for, but reading Crinrict's summary of user files may help get you oriented:

https://sims3.crinrict.com/en/2011/01/faq-user-files.html

Just to cover the basics, your user files are all installed or added to your Sims 3 game folder, which is located in Documents\Electronic Arts.  If you remove the Sims 3 folder from Documents\EA, the game won't be able to find it and will generate a new one for you the next time you play.  This new folder won't have any of the corruption that might have been present in the old folder.

This is often referred to as the "clean folder test" or the "factory reset" and is an excellent way to start troubleshooting—it helps narrow down the source of the problem.  For example, some random file in your old game folder may be corrupt; you create a new folder, that file stays in the old folder and is removed from the picture, and you don't see a problem.  Maybe you want to test a save, so you place it in a clean folder, which by definition is not corrupt, and the save still doesn't work; now you know that the save itself is corrupt, not anything else in your old game folder.

What I would recommend now is that you generate a clean folder as described, then copy over your Saves folder from the old game folder.  (Right-click on Saves, select copy, right-click inside the new game folder, select paste.)  Load up the game, go to Edit Town, copy the affected house, quit the game, delete those five cache files.  Load the game again, but this time, at the Main Menu, start a new save.  Again, go to Edit Town, place the house somewhere in town, and see whether it's still behaving oddly.

If the house now works, you can do a bit of building, then save the new version to the bin and delete the old one.  You can then quit to desktop, clear your caches (again), load up the save that has that house in it, and replace the old version with the new one from the bin.

If the house still doesn't work even in a clean folder, then the house itself may be borked in some way.  Depending on where you got it and which items it uses, there may be ways to try to repair it, but it doesn't sound like you're prepared to go down that path.