Get back old households from before clean install

Hello! After a bit of lurking and problem solving such as for the never ending loading screen upon loading households and then being sent back to the "select world" screen, I now have a working Sims 4 game, as far as I am aware of. My current problem now is how I get back all my old saves and households since before my clean install of the whole game in order to make this work. How do I get back my old households and saves? It would be a pain to never have them back.  I made sure to make a backup copy of "saves" and the "tray" folders in C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4 before I uninstalled the whole game.

If you have a backup, simply put them back into your game, (I made sure to make a backup copy of "saves" and the "tray" folders in C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4 )  where did you put the back up? )

I put my backup in a folder on my desktop until I got the game running smoothly, I also tried to copy and replace the old "save" and "tray" folders but this seems to not have been working as I cannot find my old saves OR my old households anywhere in-game.