Making Housewarming: Part 9, The Finished Book
Opening up the box with the first copies of our book!
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 nine), 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!
Well we made it! If you’ve been along for the ride the last eight weeks, we’ve gone over how we came up with the concept for our book years ago, how we created a proposal and managed to sell the idea to an incredible publisher, the process of doing photoshoots and creating the artwork and finalizing the book’s layout and design. We’ve also covered what it was like working together and how we actually word-to-paper co-wrote this thing for you. It’s been one hell of a journey.
And last week we got our first copies in and saw all of the things we’d agonized over come to life in the most amazing way possible. We spent a lot of time just staring at the pages because even though we’d seen the words and images and artwork on a computer screen and printed out on printer paper so many times, they looked a million times better and more beautiful bound together inside a hard cover.
The finished book, Probably This Housewarming, captures exactly what we set out to create. It’s a book that doesn’t fit too perfectly into any one category—in many ways it’s the story of our lives together told through the lens of the many homes we’ve lived in and the lessons we’ve learned in making them perfect-for-us. It’s full of personal stories and images of the places we’ve called home, and we hope you find it to be as inviting to read and look at as each of those homes was to create.
And in many ways it’s a guidebook, with formulaic processes to designing your own home, DIY projects laid out step-by-step, templates for things like tablescapes and cheeseboards, and recipes to follow for food and drinks you and your house guests will love.
We hope you enjoy it as the mix of those two things combined, whether you read it cover to cover, not missing a story or anecdote, or simply refer to it whenever you need to learn how to do something like build raised garden beds or create a salad dressing that won’t separate and get all weird.
It may not be a classic “interior design” book, and it’s not quite as trigger happy as those 500-page “Craft & DIY books,” and the entertaining and recipe portion doesn’t really make it a “cookbook” either—it’s something different, in its own little category, curated to fit what we believe are the elements of homemaking that come together to create a happy home life, and that are better told as a unified story than separated into different pieces. And we’re so excited for you to read it.
Thank you to everyone who has already pre-ordered a copy, as that’s the most helpful way to support any book or author you’d like to support, and if you haven’t preordered yet we hope you’ll do so! And thank you to everyone who has read through these “Making Housewarming” blog posts, we hope you’ve found them insightful and exciting. If you haven’t read them all you can scroll to the bottom of this page to see the full list!
Next week is our last post in this series, and it’s going to cover what came after finishing the book. The prep for its release, what you can expect from us over the next few months, and what life after making Housewarming will look like! We hope you’ll join in and follow along as we count down the weeks to our book’s publication! You can subscribe to our weekly newsletter to make sure you don’t miss a thing! Thank you for stopping by the blog today sweetie :)
