Love this build. Didn't like that it was a gangster's den of sorts so I got rid of all the paraphernalia. But my sims still love it.

haha yeah I plan to do that at one point for my own sims too to add more sims related stuff and remove the torture room

you already have Cottage Living when you made this so those that don't have Cottage Living like me can't use this even though I really liked this build

I don't think I used items from cottage living. You might not have updated your game to the latest version...
And if you don't have one of the packs you could still try to load the lot as the game will try to replace missing items
If it fail to find items to replace, it will just delete it so you might have some missing objects doing that but the lot should still appear.