Making Housewarming: Part 10, What Do We Call This Thing? & What's Next!
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 ten weeks (this is week ten), so make sure to check back in or join our weekly newsletter so you don’t miss anything!
Scroll to the very bottom of this post where you’ll find each post in the series and catch yourself up to speed. Or don’t! I’m not your mom!
Welp, this is it! The last installment of our ten part series all about Making our book Housewarming. Creating the book was the most challenging and exciting thing we’ve done in our career as People Who Do ‘Home’ Stuff, and so far seeing the excitement for its release has been the most rewarding reward we’ve ever been rewarded.
The internet can feel so fast paced and ephemeral, where one project we pour our heart into and share may only have a brief moment where folks can view it, enjoy it, and engage in talking about it with us. But books are different! This book isn’t going anywhere, and we’re excited that for years to come we’ll be talking about it and answering questions about it or reading emails that are either excited to tell us about a project that was done from it or even hate mail would be fun!
But, we hope you love it. I might be biased but I think you’ll love it.
It also makes a great (and kind of obvious) housewarming gift for whenever someone you love moves into a new home.
Which brings me to the title, Probably This Housewarming, or just Housewarming for short. We originally just called the book “Probably This” for, like, a full year, as a working title. It was never meant to be the final title but we needed to call it something so we and everyone working on it just referred to it as “the Probably This book.” I think even on the very first press release that only goes out to some association of book publishers, it was called “Probably This.”
In fact, it was almost a year after the first full draft of the book was done that Matt came up with Housewarming. We had talked and talked about potential titles. Sending them to our moms and all of our friends. Everyone offered great advice but mostly it was “yeah I don’t think that’s it.” We just couldn’t land on something that efficiently described the contents of the book in a way that was warm and inviting. And then one day Matt just blurted out “housewarming!” I guess it just kind of hit him in an instant. It made absolute sense, too—this book has everything you need to start a home from scratch or continue on the journey of “warming” your house, making it perfect-for-you, accounting for the varying skill levels of each reader. And that word just encapsulates such a cozy, intimate, experience of sharing your home with the people you love.
It wasn’t even a discussion, really. As soon as he said it, me and our editor were like “wow ok yeah that’s it.”
And so it got slapped on the top of the book and Housewarming became our title.
I hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about the process of creating this book from start to finish over the last ten weeks, and I hope you’ll grab a copy of Probably This Housewarming on pre-order! Right now anyone who pre-orders can also receive a custom candle we designed. You may remember it as our rose candle from our last shop collection, and it’s full of floral notes, spicy pink peppercorn, and an earthy hint of ‘potting soil’ to ground it all. We love this candle so much and think you will too! Once you pre-order you can go to this link and you’ll just upload your shipping info and a picture of your receipt and boom a candle will be in the mail for you around the book’s publication date.
Here are some cute buttons that are even more fun to press than text links!
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Over the next few months we’ll continue to focus on shouting from the rooftops about this book, because we are so happy with it and want everyone to have a copy. But we’ll also make time for a little rest, hopefully a wonderful beach trip, and finish renovating our home. It’s been wild renovating a home while writing a home design book, as the truth is that our home has looked like a wreck for almost 18 months of construction. This spring and summer should bring an end to all of that, with our kitchen renovation getting finished and tying up a few more loose ends before we can say this project is complete. Of course we’ll always be toying with the decoration and design, but there won’t be drywall dust floating around anymore!!
If you want to read more from our series Making Housewarming, scroll down below to see the full line up of posts! We cover the nitty gritty of making a proposal, finding a publisher, writing the actual text, photoshoots, artwork, book design, etc! It’s a lot! And if you want to keep up with this project and all of our future projects, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter to make sure you don’t miss a thing!
Thanks for stopping by today!
xoxo
Beau & Matt