Making Housewarming: Part 1, the Concept
Hello! Welcome to “Making Housewarming,” our series on this here blog about how we created our debut book from start to finish—everything from how we decided what we wanted to create to organizing photoshoots to finding the right publisher and a whole lot more. We’ll be covering a different part of the process every week for the next ten weeks, so make sure to check back in or join our weekly newsletter to make sure you don’t miss anything!
Be sure to scroll to the very bottom of this post where you’ll find ‘em all and catch yourself up to speed. Or don’t! I’m not your mom!
Looking back four years ago, to the night we first even considered writing what would become Probably This Housewarming (which we refer to as just “Housewarming” most of the time), the only word I can think of is… magic? We were with our friend Lily, who is pretty much as magic as a human can get, on the beach in Malibu at sunset, which is pretty much as magic as a physical setting can get, when the words “you should write a book” were first tossed out into the universe.
Now here we are almost half a decade later with what those words would become: our debut book, Housewarming, available for you to literally purchase right now and receive when it’s published April 19th.
As far as conceptualizing the book, we immediately knew that what we wanted from this whole process was a physical relic of our whole blogging career to-date. Matt and I started Probably This in 2014 to share with the people of the internet our hobby of “house things” like cooking and decorating and building—it’s become our whole lives and plays out on this blog and across Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. When it first started, we were recent college graduates who had no money and were trying to make do with what we had while still feeling comfortable in our home with thoughtfully designed spaces and homemade spreads of food whenever friends came over. We weren’t anyone special, to be honest, which is maybe part of what people liked about the content we were creating. We were just two guys figuring out what we liked, with a camera and some fingers to click clack it all onto our computers and phones to share with other people—and anything we could do, we could teach others to do.
There were a lot of awkward blog puberty moments while we figured out what the Probably This “brand” was, and like, who we were (we were in our early 20’s, remember!). I’ll skip through the growing pains and let you know where we settled: we cover the Martha Stewart verticals of homemaking, but with our own twist and less of a budget. Decorating and designing homes with care. DIY’ing all the things we want in our home but can’t afford. Cooking and picking out the perfect bottle of wine to pair.
After seeing our work for years online, our friend Lily suggested we write a book. While the three of us walked along the beach. (in Malibu, at sunset, we’ve been over this). She’d just had her beautiful book, Kale & Caramel, published a year prior, and we found her words encouraging. Like, okay wait maybe we can turn the things we’d learned and the skills we’d sharpened into a book that real humans with hands and eyes would want to enjoy???
Maybe.
We sat with it for a while and considered what it would look like—a survey of all the work we’d done in the past several years with the blog, designing and creating home stuff all within the constraints of renting (we didn’t buy our house until June 2020, so all of what’s in this book is based on our years of homemaking in rentals). We’d text each other ideas for the book throughout the day and jot them all down. Looking back on the notes app I had them saved in, a lot of our early chapter ideas were actually really great but also maybe a bit… much.
Examples of those early concepts:
“Designing a bedroom that will turn any hookup into a LTR”
“How to Make Your Apartment Appear Furnished Enough for Instagram Pics for Less Than $1000”
“Tablescapes for Control Freaks Who Want to Come Off Casual”
Funny enough, the book will actually teach you how to do those things, we just toned down the chapter titles.
After a year of letting this little idea simmer and an encouraging meeting with our literary agent, we decided it was time to create a book proposal. We’ll get into the nitty gritty of working with a literary agent and what a book proposal actually is later on in this series, so check back for that or join our weekly newsletter for reminders on when the next post is up! Basically though, a big chunk of a book proposal is just outlining the book you want to write, which is, well, hard.
We spent a frigid week in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in January of 2020, pedal to the metal pumping out our book proposal. On our last night in Santa Fe, we printed out what we’d come up with: the skeleton of what would eventually become Housewarming. Just an (80-page) introduction and outline that got at the heart of what we wanted to create, with a summary of every chapter we wanted to include, two fully written sample chapters, lots of facts and figures about our audience, and sweet little introductions to us, that would hopefully win over the hearts of publishers.
Ultimately, most of our time that week was spent deciding what information deserved to live forever in a physical book and would be a timeless entry for people to refer back to for years and years. And what we found was that a mix of broader philosophies around homemaking—things like our design process and how we prepare having guests over—intertwined with specific projects that put those philosophies into play but could also be riffed on an endless number of ways. Whittling down our ideas this way also met our goal of making this book not only great for someone looking to better their own home life, but also a great item for gifting to a bff who just moved into a new place. There just aren’t a lot of great housewarming gifts out there that really say “welcome to your new home,” but I think this kind of nails it to be honest.
We wanted Housewarming to be an invitation to experiment with the ins and outs of homemaking in the cozy form of a book. And so, we curated the guts of this book to do just that. We guide you through designing your home—whether it’s a bedroom in your parents’ place or a shared apartment, or a full fledged house you’ve owned and loved for years. We then walk you through approachable DIY projects that you can do to make your design dreams come to life. Finally, for when it’s all come together, we provide you with our approach to entertaining. Everything from how to set a mood with lighting to a massive intro-to-wine chapter to a formula for tablescaping to several of our favorite recipes.
The goal is to give you a book that you can use as a reference, or read cover to cover, because it’s filled with personal anecdotes from our lives and lessons, and (I like to think) entertaining, funny, and helpful text in addition to 150 photos and plenty of illustrations (we’ll cover the photoshoot and illustration process later on in this series!). We’re so proud of this book, and how it came to be. We’d love for you to preorder a copy, because that’s the biggest way to support any book’s success, and if you enjoyed this little bit of insight join our weekly email (one email, every Wednesday, no more but occasionally less) where you’ll get updates and notices of when a new part of this series has been published. We’re covering the whole big process of writing our first book over the course of ten weeks and we hope you’ll join us for the ride!
Thanks for stopping by today, and we look forward to sharing more with you on next week’s part 2: The Proposal.
XOXOXO
Beau & Matt
