The Fly-Ty Retreat

This house has been in the works for a long while. We sold our second house about two years ago. We sold because we knew that our next step was to build a house, our forever house. It was a dream we hoped would come to fruition.

So, you can bet we've been searching house plans and blue prints for years. My favorite place to peruse (for hours and hours each night) was Southern Living House Plans. I searched here because I knew I wanted a Southern, Lowcountry home. This site has so many plans you can get lost in the shuffle, but once you know what size and type of house you are looking for the search becomes manageable.

Our musts were: Lowcountry facade, 2000-2250 sq. ft, three bedrooms, two and a half baths, no bathtub in the master bathroom, open-concept, and a fireplace. Specific, but attainable.

Jesse and I had a top five that we constantly referred back to. We hadn't yet fallen in love, however. One night we revisited a house we liked at the very beginning of our dreaming... It had all of our musts. It was everything we wanted, but not out of our realm of possibility.

We fell in LOVE with the Fly-Ty Retreat from Southern Living!

It was "the one", but it wasn't perfect. There were a couple of things we wanted to change. We wanted to reverse the house, enclose the covered porch and make it a den (which now has the house at 2100 sq. ft.), not have two doors on the front of the house, and pull out the laundry room door to be flush with the hall. That's not too much to ask, right?

Would Southern Living let us make changes?

Would we buy plans from Southern Living or would we need to go to an architect?

After consulting our builder (another post for another day), we decided to buy the plans from Southern Living if they made the changes for us. They did! We worked with Southern Living's architect out of Minnesota. They sent us proofs for approval, worked quickly, and catered to our needs. Southern Living had us full sets of digital plans within about two weeks. We were happy and content.

The home is now "the one" AND it is perfect!

I would work with Southern Living again. It was expensive, but they got us what we needed in a professional and timely manner. The only thing we had to do that we wouldn't have had to do if we were to work with a local architect was to take them to get approved from engineers familiar with our local building codes.

Here is a sneak at our upstairs and downstairs with changes made! What do you think?