Finding Southern Living House Plans Online

When you are looking for house plans, an online search can be particularly helpful. With thousands of free plans to search, the odds of finding the right home plan for your needs are very much in your favor. Here are some tips to get your started in your search for Southern Living house plans online.

Start with generic keywords.

A search for a “three bedroom Southern Living home plan with a screened porch” will return a few good links, but you’ll miss out on many more unless you sift through countless pages of results. For greater efficiency, find a house plan site by looking for “house plans” or “house floor plans.”

Begin with a basic search.

To find Southern Living home plans, you need to skip the simple search form that you will typically find on the home page and click on “advanced search” instead. Why? A four bedroom home between 2,000 and 2,500 square feet will return hundreds of results, and you’ll spend a great deal of time looking for Southern Living styles. Shorten the process considerably by choosing a style from the beginning. Southern Living house plans – or plans with the features that make Southern House plans so popular -- will typically fall under one of the following architectural design types:
- Country House Plans
- Southern House Plans
- Cottage House Plans
- Farmhouse Plans
- Victorian House Plans
- Traditional House Plans
Before you hit “search,” fill in the number of bedrooms you’d like to have and the square footage you are looking for. Don’t be too precise unless you have very strict personal preferences, because you never know when you’ll find a great house that just needs a slight modification. With an overly rigid search, it may not show up at all.

Narrow the field.

If your results number in the hundreds, you may want to choose additional features that are important to you. Don’t click on every feature that sounds like something you might like, or, once again, you’ll eliminate some potentially great homes without ever seeing them. Instead, add one or two parameters at a time and renew the search. Start with the features that are most important to you and continue to add criteria until only a reasonable number of designs remain.

Take notes.

If you see features that you love in a plan that you don’t necessarily like, write it down anyway. You may decide to include it in further searches or try to find a way to incorporate it with any plan modifications that you make later.

Shop around.

Bookmark or save your favorite plans, but don’t pull out your credit card just yet. There are dozens of sites that offer thousands of floor plans, with several hundred additional floor plan websites belonging to a single architect or design group. While it’s not practical to try to see every plan, you should attempt to view as many as possible before making a decision. Keep in mind that, while many house plans will appear on more than one site, many more will not. If you fall in love with a plan, print it out so you can compare it to other plans you like.

If you follow these tips for searching the web, you will quickly have an extensive selection of Southern Living house plans online from which to choose – one of them is bound to be just what you were looking for!