It was the Best of Times, It was the Busiest of Times

Whew! Where has the time gone?! Seems like just yes­ter­day it was Feb­ru­ary and I blinked once and now it’s JUNE! What the heck!? As the title says, it’s been a great time late­ly, but so soo soooooo busy. What have I been up to? Not much once you dis­re­gard ren­o­va­tions on our new house, mov­ing both of us into the new house, plan­ning for the wed­ding, going viral around the world, fin­ish­ing up my book pro­pos­al and query­ing agents, work­ing full-time, hav­ing a social life, and sup­port­ing my fiancé’s daugh­ter through the tail end of 7^th grade. 

If you feel out of the loop, check out this post on all things get­ting engaged and buy­ing our house!

Renovations

We bought a beau­ti­ful 3 bed­room, 2.5 bath­room split lev­el house in Decem­ber. It was the­o­ret­i­cal­ly move-in ready, but we decid­ed to under­take a few cos­met­ic upgrades before we moved in — most of the loud, dusty, incon­ve­nient ones. Before we moved in, my fiancé and I did the fol­low­ing to the house: 

• Scraped all the pop­corn tex­ture off the ceil­ings (~2,000 sq ft)
• Mud­ded the ceilings
• Sand­ed the ceilings
• Mud­ded anoth­er lay­er on the ceilings
• Sand­ed the ceilings
• Paint­ed the ceilings
• Swapped 5 light fixtures
• Paint­ed all the walls
• Ripped up the car­pet on the upper lev­el in the bed­rooms and the stairs
• Laid new hard­wood floor­ing upstairs
• Put new ris­ers and treads on the stairs
• Hired a plumber to install a gas line to the patio for the grill

There’s prob­a­bly more, but my brain did­n’t real­ly have the capac­i­ty to absorb all the fin­er details of every­thing we did. It’s a dusty blur of exhaus­tion in my mind! Rough esti­mate is about $12,000 between the mate­ri­als and tools, and we did it all our­selves with the excep­tion of the gas line to the patio. My fiancé is very handy and I am no slouch myself in that depart­ment, so with the occa­sion­al help from fam­i­ly and friends we knocked it all out in just a few short months. I’m so hap­py with the results! Nasty beige car­pet, bor­ing white walls, and out­dat­ed pop­corn ceil­ings are gone in favor of soft white walls in the main liv­ing areas, fresh and bright ceil­ings, new floor­ing, and wall col­ors that match our per­son­al­i­ties in our bed­rooms. We love it!

Wove, True Wove

Wed­ding plan­ning is going well, which is excel­lent news since we only have 5 weeks left until we get mar­ried! We did make it easy on our­selves by decid­ing to do a “micro-wed­ding” in our back­yard with only our fam­i­ly in atten­dance instead of a big fan­cy wed­ding. My fiancé has already done the big fan­cy wed­ding thing before and I have no inter­est in it, so it was a nat­ur­al choice for us both. We decid­ed to do the fol­low­ing instead: 

• We live on 1.25 acres with a big back­yard, gaze­bo, and fire pit that makes it a nat­ur­al fit for our wed­ding. Plus, the venue is rea­son­ably priced at $free.99 😀
• My dress is actu­al­ly a for­mal event gown that only cost $230 (with an extra $400 in alter­ations). I went for a time­less, yet relaxed, vibe for my dress. 
• We like sim­ple and we like tasty, so our cater­er is Chipo­tle. No need to spend $50 a plate when we can spend $500 total to feed every­one. Since there are no restric­tions at our venue, we can feel free to bor­row cool­ers and fill them up with drinks from a trip to Sam’s Club/Costco. Bonus: no need to pay a bar­tender either!
• I balk at the idea of spend­ing a ton of mon­ey on flow­ers that are just going to die short­ly after using them, so our flo­rals are of the glass and Lego vari­ety. I found a local glass artist who makes beau­ti­ful glass ros­es and spent about $300 on glass ros­es for my bou­quet that will last for­ev­er and remind us of our day any­time we see them. Our cen­ter­pieces will be Lego Botan­i­cal sets that will be fin­ished by our fam­i­lies while they wait for us to take pic­tures. Don’t wor­ry — they’re very excit­ed about putting the Lego flow­ers together!
• I asked my fiancé what col­or our table run­ners should be. He said a back­yard wed­ding with Chipo­tle for din­ner did­n’t real­ly need coör­di­nat­ing linens, which I thought made a lot of sense. Instead, I found some­one on Etsy who does per­son­al­ized table cov­er col­or­ing sheets which is hon­est­ly much more us than try­ing to be trendy with navy blue burlap table run­ners. Once again, our fam­i­ly is stoked we’ll give them the chance to col­or their tablecloths! 
• We aren’t real­ly going to do any danc­ing. We might do one dance at the end of the night in the mid­dle of our patio, but our fam­i­lies aren’t real­ly dancers and this elim­i­nates the need to hire a DJ. 
• Once it gets dark enough, we’re going to light a fire and make some s’mores! I love s’mores and it will be a fun activ­i­ty for every­one to do. We’re also not doing a tra­di­tion­al cake (since I am gluten-intol­er­ant) so the s’mores will com­ple­ment the home­made gf brown­ies we’ll have for dessert. 

In short, we’re mak­ing the wed­ding into some­thing we like, and dis­card­ing pret­ty much every oth­er aspect of what a tra­di­tion­al wed­ding entails. All told, our bud­get is about $10,000 which is down­right rea­son­able for a wed­ding these days. Our (my) one big splurge is on pho­tog­ra­phy. Hav­ing high-qual­i­ty pho­tos tak­en by tal­ent­ed pro­fes­sion­als was a non-nego­tiable for me. We found a great cou­ple at a local bridal show/expo who will be shoot­ing our wed­ding for $5,000. That’s two shoot­ers for 8 hours, pro­cess­ing, and an album, which hon­est­ly isn’t bad. They already did our engage­ment pho­tos and I LOVED the results, so I’m super excit­ed about hav­ing high-qual­i­ty pic­tures of our big day 🙂 

Going Viral 

I did a few inter­views with Busi­ness Insid­er at the end of last year and the begin­ning of 2024 which appar­ent­ly sparked a huge avalanche of cov­er­age world­wide. In ear­ly Feb­ru­ary I was fea­tured in an arti­cle on For­tune, which then got picked up by The Toron­to Sun, the Dai­ly Mail, LaVan­guardia, some­where in East­ern Europe, some­where in Aus­tralia, and a few pub­li­ca­tions in South Amer­i­ca which then spurred Uni­vi­sion to pick up my sto­ry. That’s Cana­da, the UK, Spain, East­ern Europe, Aus­tralia, Colom­bia, Brazil, and Mex­i­co for those keep­ing track. It was absolute­ly wild to get so many DM’s from peo­ple in oth­er lan­guages and rely on Google Trans­late to respond. (My absolute favorite mes­sage was some­one who want­ed me to invest in their banana farm in Mexico!) 

As my sto­ry was spread­ing across the globe, it start­ed to gar­ner the atten­tion of a dif­fer­ent kind of media — TV pro­duc­ers. I had a few pro­duc­ers reach out to me about com­ing on their shows (big names in Amer­i­can day­time TV show world) but noth­ing ever panned out. Which was dis­ap­point­ing, because it would’ve been a huge step up in mar­ket­ing my book proposal. 

The Book Proposal!

I fin­ished the first draft of my book pro­pos­al and query let­ter in Feb­ru­ary to try and cap­i­tal­ize on being a “viral sen­sa­tion”. I start­ed off small with two agents. One agent was excit­ed and gave it some seri­ous thought before very nice­ly turn­ing me down. The oth­er agent was a cold query and my query died a qui­et death in the slush pile.

I’ve got­ten some more feed­back on my book pro­pos­al and will be enhanc­ing it for a sec­ond round of query­ing lat­er this year. With every­thing else going on in life, I’m just too busy to take it on right now. I’ll be mak­ing time and space for the book pro­pos­al after we host our big recep­tion par­ty in Sep­tem­ber for all our friends and fam­i­ly who we could­n’t accom­mo­date at the wedding. 

~

All in all, it has been a won­der­ful year so far, jam packed with activ­i­ties and events. I’m still inter­est­ed in writ­ing about life on this blog, but you can under­stand why updates are more spo­radic these days. I have a lot of thoughts about com­bin­ing two incomes into one house­hold and plan­ning for the future with all sorts of new variables!

As always, thanks for reading! 

Love,