Hi guys, I never bothered with buying homes in OB, except for the Imperial City one. After playing Skyrim and buying some of the homes there, I decided to buy some in OB. I bought the racks for the home but am not sure how to use em. In Skyrim, you put the crosshair over them and can activate them. In OB nothing seems to appear for me to activate them. When I put the crosshair over them, I get nothing. Am I doing something wrong? Any help would be great. Thanks.

Racks in Oblivion don't function like racks in Skyrim; you must manually place objects on racks in Oblivion by holding down the 'Grab' button (LB on Xbox, Z on PC, L2 on PS3).

Cool, thanx for the help.

One tip, when you're playing items, is to save every so often when you're happy with how the shelf looks. That means if you slip with an item and knock everything off, you can just reload instead of having to pick up everything and start again.

A very, very good advice from our Lady-Mara. Save every time you get something right. You will regret it if you don′t, I promise.

http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f278/katietiedrich/comic241.png

There is a mod called "Decorator assistant". I think I need to try it sometime.
It gives you choices to place items & lock them in place.

I've noticed in the Imperial City shack that there is a stone vase or pitcher that no matter how many times I place it on the shelf when I leave and return a few days later it is always back to the original spot on the floor in front of the chest where it was when I first bought the shanty! Poltergiest maybe? or one of my Thieves Guild mates having a bit of fun with me?

You don't even know how many times i've rage quit OB because of this... once took an entire day to sort a book shelf...

All because you didn′t read the manual to Doom 3 close enough; Save and save often...

Ah yes, spending an hour placing a book in Oblivion because everything has to be 'just right' fun times.

So true.
You need to make your home arrangements around these respawning items. If you remove an item, it will respawn in about a week, forcing anything you put in its place to explode your house.
Rage quitting while decorating is normal for me.
This is my biggest peeve with this game. You give us all these things to place around our home, but no real way of placing them without explosions all over the place.

One key to re-arranging things it that the original items are usually non-persistent (meaning the game doesn't remember anything about them in the save), and will be reset to their original location on a cell reset, if you just grab and move them. If you want them to stay put, you need to pick them up and drop them again (i.e. they go into your inventory and out again). Anything you drop from inventory is persistent and will stay put. PC players can check this by opening the console and clicking on the item. It will have a ref ID starting with "FF" because it's a game-created copy.

ghastley is exactly correct. The only thing I'll add is that food is different. Even if you eat it, it will fully respawn in its original location - just something to work around. If you have a bowl on your table with 3 apples, put it all in your pack and go away, when you come back (after 3 days), there will be three new apples sitting on the table.

If only that was the case in this world!

My avatar used this extensively at his lodge in New Sheoth and a bit in Verona House during my first play-through. It does indeed work as advertised. It's not a perfect solution for all situations, but you can do a heck of a lot with it.

-Decrepit-