So I spent a good 3 weeks getting stuck into terraria and found this thing called the 'NPC city mod' which seems to be a work in progress that someone has simply forgotten about.
Now I took it upon myself to fix up some of the sprites in it and created a few new sprites from bits and pieces of other stuff. (not to mention debug some of the C++ code for the mod) and this is what I've come up with sofar.

ehh.. terraria. more fun modding than actually playing =p