The Short Version

Hi! We're Matt and Beau. We're based in New Orleans, where we’re currently renovating a Victorian-era shotgun home while writing about design, DIY, and entertaining on this blog and in our book Housewarming. We love beautiful homes, making things with our two (four?) hands, and creating delicious spreads of food for friends and family and aall you sweet sweet humans on the internet. Matt's the bald one, Beau's the irreverent one, and Fox, Barley, and Rye are the tiny ones covered in fur. You can check us out on Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest, or browse around this site to see what we're all about.

The Long Version

We're Matt and Beau. We met in the spring of 2013 while we were both in college, and quickly found ourselves obsessing over each other in every cute and annoying way possible. We bonded over normal things like our shared love of Jameson and ginger ale, and karaoke bars, and both of us being from New Orleans and the complicated love / hate relationship with the city that can only really be felt for a hometown. 

We started dating pretty much immediately and within two months we were on our way to live in Southeast Asia together for an entire summer to teach English to business professionals, which was an odd choice but pretty amazing. We managed to fit a few years’ worth of fights and makeups and *special moments* all into that one summer. There were many nights of going out to dinner with our students and drinking beer in alleys in Ho Chi Minh City, kind of dangerous motorbike rides through insanely congested highways, the most beautiful natural sights we've ever seen in north Vietnam and in Thailand, and being awestruck at Siem Reap. There were also 2 a.m. fights fueled by sleeping in 90 degree heat and not understanding each other's quirks or needs yet and the fear of living in a foreign country with someone you just met. It was a lot. We came back to the states and continued on our lives together, living in a not cute college apartment and focusing on things like paying rent and finishing term papers and working in restaurants until very very late at night.

About a year into our relationship, when Beau was a senior in college and Matt was a college grad working the latest of late nights at a restaurant in the French Quarter, the idea to start a blog came around. Beau was extremely unsure of what he was going to do with his degree in PR once he finished school - and its fuzzy - but somehow Matt and a friend came up with the idea that a blog should be a thing. It went something like, "you're always making fancy cheeseboards and redecorating the apartment, why don't you just put it online."

So it happened, and Beau began working on taking photos (which was kind of a disaster) and trying to find a voice (which was kind of a disaster) and getting at times too creative in the kitchen (which was kind of a disaster) - and after a solid six months of weird blog puberty, something kind of solid started to form. At first the primary focus was on food, and so it was called, "Probably Baking" and was meant to answer the world's most annoying question of "what're you doing when you finish college." The truth was that post-college future was looking remarkably dismal, so yeah baking sounded fun.  

The time when the blog began to take shape coincided with Beau graduating college and our post-graduate celebratory road trip from San Francisco to Vancouver. Which is when we spent all of our money and got really really drunk on accident in wine country and really really really high on accident from "healing caramels" in Vancouver and found ourselves in underground bars and lost in redwood forests and in a mountaintop glass cabin that was equal parts serene and terrifying. We realized we really liked Seattle and we didn't love Portland as much as we expected to and that we could easily spend any sum of money on everything from jeans to wine because we're both far too excessive. That last part would become a theme in our relationship.

Somewhere on that trip - maybe between getting really drunk in wine country and accidentally really high in Vancouver - we decided Matt should be even more of a part of the blog than he already was, and maybe instead of focusing so much on kitchen adventures, the blog could include more of our faces and life together, and our other interests and talents in the fields of interior design and entertaining. It was a slow and awkward transition because we both hated being on camera and Beau couldn't smile quite *right* and Matt didn't really know how to take photos and so this new blog concept entered another weird stage of blog puberty. We decided to rename the blog to "Probably This" - because now instead of post-college baking, it was just post-college living. So, basically, it's meant to answer the question  "what are you doing?"

Life went on, we kept working various jobs, some good and some not. Matt successfully helped open a restaurant in a haunted mansion. Beau started more seriously honing in on his love of interior design with projects around our house and for local clients, and began managing an art gallery in the Garden District. We adopted the light of our literal lives, a 6-pound angel fur baby named Fox, who still makes our hearts melt every morning when he does his in-bed stretches and every evening when he falls asleep on whichever one of our limbs is the most still.

We continued making this blog a thing and posting about our daily - often mundane - lives. Sometime in the beginning of 2016 we started getting actual work through this site and for other partner companies. At first it was trickling in, and then like a very fortunate avalanche our schedule was filled with creative tasks and photoshoots and planning and trying to organize everything. There was a point at which we looked at our checking account and realized through the blog alone we had enough money to live on (scarcely) for maybe a few months. Beau quit his gallery job, Matt followed suit three months later. We had a very modest sum in our checking account and thought it was an OK idea to celebrate our new self-employed freedom by taking a month-long road trip across the country, from New Orleans to Los Angeles and back. It was 2016. It was a risk. It was dumb. It was very fun.

We didn't know it then but things would actually turn out OK. We continued getting work, and took on jobs for everything from food photography to, at one point, designing a full six-unit apartment complex. We learned how to use our accounting software (kind of ) and how to confidently be our own bosses and know our own value and along the way developed relationships with many recognizable brands and the people who keep them running. It was a whirlwind, and we learned more in that first year of freelancing than we probably did in our entire time in college (heh, sorry @ college).

While we were working on keeping the blog running and growing, and really creating a home we loved, some friends passing through New Orleans gave us the idea to take an old run down camper and completely renovate it. Because why not add something massive to our to-do list. It sounded like an American fantasy, and after a bit of careful planning and a few thoughtful emails, we'd successfully figured out how to go about it. Just one month later, Rosie arrived at our door. A sweet, 1969 camper trailer that just needed the perfect dads to treat her right. We were so excited! And then we realized we'd just signed ourselves up for a wild summer project. 

 July, August, and September of 2017 saw us in a perpetual state of dirt and sweat as we tackled big questions like "what do I do with 50-year-old garbage?" and "how do we cut all this tile?" and "honey who do we think we are???"—our new power tool collection was giving us an identity crisis. But we got it done, and by October we were ready for our first camper trip up to North Carolina for a week, where we taught ourselves and Fox the ins and outs of hiking and building fires. Apparently the secret for complete beginners is you gotta have one of them fancy starter logs or else you're screwed. 

We didn't expect this, but photos of Rosie would end up all over Pinterest, and get picked up by Design Sponge, Country Living, and Dwell Magazine. Rosie was kind of a hit, and we couldn't have been happier about it. So with all that excitement, we returned to New Orleans and had to decide where the hell we wanted to live, because our lease was ending. We didn't want to stay put, and we needed to make a plan. We left behind the pink home that we loved and sold basically everything that we owned. 

A couple months of getting our lives together, and we were ready to pack up Rosie, our pup, and what little we had left ... and head out West. We did food and street art things in Austin, had all the Southwestern fun in Arizona and New Mexico and Southern Utah, and then spent a month up and down California. Our route back took us through more mountain hangouts in Utah and Colorado, and then a speedy return home because we were ready to have a full kitchen and a nice big shower again, etc. The trip ended up being 89 days, just shy of the three months we'd planned. There are no words to accurately describe selling everything you own, moving into a camper trailer, and just... going wherever. It was fantastic and hard and amazing and tiring and we're probably never doing that again but so glad that it happened.

In August of 2018 we moved just outside of New Orleans to a small town called Covington, Louisiana. It was kind of a random move, driven by our need to get a little bit of space outside of the city we’re so used to. And it did exactly that. We had so much time to focus on what we wanted our lives to look like, and to move further towards our goals.

We launched a small dream of ours: an online shop with items we’ve created. We always thought it would be fun to have a little space to showcase our creativity in the form of product, so Probably This Collection was born to do just that. Through our seasonal collections we’ve been able to show a bit more of our personality and interact with our internet friends in a whole new way. Seeing people posting about their collection goodies with such excitement quickly became our favorite thing ever.

Although moving to a small town was slightly frustrating due to the distance it put between us and our friends (everyone was suddenly an hour away instead of five minutes), it was incredibly beneficial for our finances, productivity, and mental health. We spent our days in a sweet little apartment with a forest view while working on creating design + DIY + food content for the internet (and ourselves!).

After two years living in that home and saving our money, we realized we could now pursue our next dream: purchasing a home back in New Orleans.

And then it was March 13th, 2020, and the entire world shut down.

 After a couple of months of waiting, we decided that even in this Very Weird time, we could still move ahead with buying a home. We found an adorable Victorian-era home in a quaint neighborhood, put an offer in the day we saw it, and a month and half later moved in. It became our immediate focus, with so many different spaces to work on and renovate and redesign. And we’re still at it! You can check in on our progress around the house right here, in fact!

We’re so grateful for this home, and our online community we get to share this adventure (and all of our adventures!) with. Thank you for keeping us company! And of course, you can get (almost) daily updates about our life, travel, design, and recipes by following us on Instagram, and watch us be dumb on TikTok. If you want to keep up with us on a weekly basis, subscribe to our weekly email, where we share updates on our lives, new blog posts, inspiration for all things ~ home ~ and exclusive giveaways!

xoxo

Beau & Matt