So, what happens when you have a perfectly beautiful piece of land to live on with no house?

House plans of course!

I'm not too sure how people found house plans before Pinterest, but it must have been a longer, more tedious process than what we went through, right?

I had a pretty clear idea of the kind of house I wanted, and so did my husband. Most of our ideas were incredibly similar, except one major difference.

I wanted a 1 story. He wanted a 2 story.

ICK! A two story house? Who does that? Probably someone who has grown up in a two story house. He probably thought, "Ick! A one story house? Who does that?" And I would have responded, "Someone who has grown up in a one story house. And someone who will not haul laundry up the stairs!"

We searched plan after plan. I scoured Pinterest while he looked through architecturaldesigns.com. We found hundreds of floor plans, but like I said before, we did agree on a few things. 3+ bedrooms, open concept, island kitchen, master on the first floor, 3 car garage. 

After a while, we narrowed it down to this floor plan:



[See more pictures of the interior of this beautiful Stephen Alexander home here.]

I have to say, one of the main reasons we fell in love with this house was the interior pictures. It's definitely hard to choose a home when you can't quite figure out how the inside would look. This Stephen Alexander home was spectacular. 3 bedroom, formal dining room, open layout, island kitchen. But then there were things that I wasn't 100% on board with. It was 2 story, with no available room downstairs to make into a spare/guest bedroom. The porch was small for the size of our lot. The kitchen had few cabinets and a small pantry. The bedrooms upstairs weren't equal (future sibling fights). So while we said this was the house plan, we kept looking from time to time.

After months of going back and forth, texting different plans and talking about what we really wanted, we rediscovered this plan.




[Check this plan out and use the links listed in the "About this Plan" to see similar floor plans and the photos on Facebook.]


I had pinned this plan months before, but never gave it a look. It has a larger sister plan that showed interior photos and that is what sold us. [I'm such a visual learner]. The huge porches, the jack-and-jill bathroom, the study, the bonus room, the perfect kitchen, the double fireplace. What wasn't to love? We talked about this plan extensively. After a few months of not loving anything more than this house, we pulled the trigger.

With help from our builder, we've made some adjustments by changing the study into a guest room with full attached bath, eliminated the porch door to the master, changed the porch door from the nook into the living room through French doors, and adjusted the utility room. These were simple adjustments that made more sense for what we needed. The major adjustments came from the exterior, which we mostly scrapped, but that is a conversation for another post! 

We are getting closer and closer to closing on our loan and beginning construction, so I can't wait to post my inspirations for each room and progress!