We were on our daily walk, a regimen we began after we moved into our new neighborhood in 2020. Each day we walk the same route, and except for the things that naturally change with the seasons, the surroundings are so familiar that we can walk on autopilot without much thought about navigating. This allows our minds to be free to muse on other things, and quite often those things involve what we do together in running the day-to-day business of Lafayette Flats.

Toward the end of 2022, the subject of our musing was often our approaching tenth anniversary. Not our wedding anniversary – that had happened earlier that year – but the tenth anniversary of Lafayette Flats. As we started talking about what we should do to celebrate the event, we realized that there was no clear date on which we could point to that we could say was the birth date of our business, since it had all unfolded over so many months. It was a long journey that traveled through inspiration, aspiration, and lots of perspiration. As we talked that day, we realized that we first had the germ of an idea in December of 2012, but didn’t open for business until April of 2014.

As Shawn was pointing out the difficulty of picking a particular date to celebrate because the process had taken so long, Amy remarked that perhaps we should write a book that would recount all of it – from start to finish. And that is why Shawn spent many hours over the past year tapping away on his laptop.

The result is “Creating Lafayette Flats,” 176 pages that begin with how we fell in love with Fayetteville and retraces every step of the unlikely journey we took from tourists to hospitality entrepreneurs by buying and renovating a century-old building in which we could host visitors to the New River Gorge.

We are proud of the finished product and hope that you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed reliving the excitement and trepidation as we reminisced and researched in preparation to write it all down. Like everything we do at Lafayette Flats, “Creating Lafayette Flats” was a labor of love that is meant to be shared with our guests, friends, and family.

“Creating Lafayette Flats” is available at Lost Appalachia Trading Company in Fayetteville, WV and Plot Twist Books in South Charleston, WV. You can also order it on Amazon.