ok, was thinking of making a hose mod for myself, and was wondering how hard is it to take a existing building and convert it?

i want to take Jorrvasker, remove everyhtign ecxept tables, shelves and weapon racks. and put in all the profesion stations and alot of storage.. and hten place it somewhere outside whiterun.

i've never done any modding like that before, only adding basic npcs and modded items.

Well I suppose the simplest thing you could do is select the interior cell (there are at least two if I remember correctly) of Jorrvasker and duplicate it. But at that point you would be duplicating everything that goes on in that cell, events, quest triggers....And I am certainly not the most knowledgeable person about this subject, but this process would most likely give you some dirty edits especially when you start to delete things you don't want.

Another, probably better method in the long run, would be to make your own new cell. Then take a look at the Jorrvasker interior see what pieces are used and fit them together yourself (you could even just copy the X,Y,Z coordinates of each piece). This will take longer but will keep you from making any dirty edits which you do not want.

Personally I would choose the second method. Other forum goers will be able to give you a much better explanation of what goes on when you duplicate a vanilla cell. Other than that houses are pretty easy depending on what you want to do with them.

I would try duplicating the jorrvasker cells, interior and exterior into an empty ESP. Then close the CK and load the new ESP back like a master and copy from it into another ESP. I think the dirty edits will be in the intermediate ESP and not in the final ESP and you won't need the intermediate ESP again. I haven't tried this so it is just a theory and you will want to check before you go any further to make sure the vanilla cells are not marked as revised. Relocating the exterior will then be the biggest issue. There isn't much empty space around Whiterun either.

If you edit the exterior of whiterun be careful of what you mess with, you might cause an incompatibility and get multiple CTD's if you edit something the vanilla skyirm relies upon.