Ashley and I got engaged and were married within three months (and we had a fantastic wedding thanks to our parents--and not having to deal with the stress of agonizing over decisions for months).
Our first son arrived 2 weeks early and in a town 2 hours away from our home. He was "Baby Boy" for the first 24 hours of his life until his name came to me in a dream. We also waited to name our second-born after he arrived (in our local hospital, though!).
And so, even though we had owned the land for many, many months, I drug my feet on settling on a house plan. The idea of picking a home that would grow with our family, that had room for all our current and future activities, overwhelmed me. Everyone else had lots of opinions about what we should build but I remained indifferent for a long time.
Because we're from the South and like a farmhouse/cottage look, we spent a lot of our time looking at Southern Living plans. Twice we ordered study plans from the Moser Design Group. But both plans lacked something or would require too many revisions. House plan names filtered in and out of my head...Aiken Ridge, Glenview, Wildmere. We even named unnamed plans: Master Master and Red Roof Inn. I had my brother, a contractor in Colorado, review plans. My friend Emily, an architect in Oregon, also offered to help.
Maybe it was the stress of having to move so quickly from our house or maybe it was knowing that we needed to find a plan ASAP...but regardless, one night I couldn't sleep and I came across a downstairs floor plan I loved. It matched the exterior of a plan Ashley loved. The next morning I contacted the Allison Ramsey firm and asked if it would be possible to combine the two? I knew anything was possible...more accurately, I wondered how expensive would it be combine these two pieces.
A day or two later, I was excited to learn that a plan that did that already existed. What luck! The only snag was it was larger than we wanted. All along we had been focused on finding a plan that was around 2500 square feet. We're just not a McMansion type of family so building a house that was was 3000 feet or larger felt too big. After a week of emailing back and forth with Bill Harris, the architect at Allison Ramsey (who was so helpful, by the way), we had a proposal for how much it would cost to redraw the plan and scale it back.
My heart sunk when I saw the quote of $4200. Yes, we could theoretically afford to pay for a redesign and have a custom house. It was the perfect house, after all! But $4200 is a lot of money (I'm saying this with the utmost respect for the architect profession). We really needed that money to go towards the actual construction of our house.
That night, Ashley and I had a long discussion about what to do. In the end, we decided we can be happy in almost any house. We were happy in our first house that was off of a dirt road and only had one bathroom. We were happy in the house we just sold--even though it smelled like nicotine when we first bought it and the neighborhood felt a little sketchy at times. And we are happy in the house we're renting from friends, even though it's smaller and one of us has to park on the street.
Happiness doesn't come from having the perfect house. Happiness comes from our family and being together in a home together. Realizing this, we revisited some of the plans we had looked at before. Could we build one of these stock plans and be happy?
Ultimately we decided YES and it was amazingly freeing. The hunt for the perfect house plan was over. For us, the perfect house plan doesn't exist. Or maybe it does exist, but we're not going to spend the time or money required to find it.
We're going to build the Glen View Cottage, a house designed Moser Design Group in Beaufort, SC, for Southern Living. The plans are ordered and should arrive this week. Here we go!
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