This is the first I am give a little glimpse into my personal life and what my background as an entrepreneur has looked like. I’m a little bit hesitant to do this because I feel like it’s like a tell all episode at the end of like a reality TV series. But we are gonna just go for it and I’m gonna kind of bare my soul, be pretty vulnerable with you all as we dive into everything that has to do with the wedding venue in Kentucky.

The Beginning

So if you have never even heard of me and you’re wondering who is this woman and what is she talking about? In 2021, my husband got out of the Marine Corps, so he was no longer active duty and we became civilians. And that transition to civilian life in and of itself was a challenging transition. There was a lot more accountability for the decisions that you make in your personal life in terms of like where you want to move and what you want to do and the work life balance that comes with not being told that you have to do something or be somewhere for, you know, six months at a time, what have you. So that’s where this particular story is going to begin is in the spring of 2021 and that was as he was preparing to get out of the Marine Corps, we were figuring out where in the world we were going to live.

Caleb said, when we first got married that when he got out of the Marine Corps, regardless of whether that was in 20 years after he made it a full career or if he decided to get out early, which in our case, he did, he got out after seven years, whenever he got out, he wanted to move to Kentucky.

And I didn’t really think much of it, A, because I thought we were going to be in for 20 years and that maybe that decision would change multiple times between now and then. And B, I didn’t really know what the draw to Kentucky specifically was. He was born in Tennessee, but there was no real ties to Kentucky.

However, he says he likes bourbon. And he likes horses, so he wanted to go to Kentucky. What other better place could there be other than Kentucky to get those two things? So, that’s why we moved to Kentucky. I said, “Well, if you get your dream of moving to Kentucky, then I would like to get my dream of owning and running a wedding venue.”

So as we decided to move to Kentucky, we began the search for possible properties that could be turned into a wedding venue. That search actually started long before 2021. I looked for almost two years at properties, just kind of dreaming and having a catch-all filter on my Realtor app that would send me properties that would fit our specifications. We looked and looked and looked. We came out to Kentucky twice to look at various properties. The second time we came out to Kentucky was in April of 2021. We were actually staying in Lexington because we thought we wanted to be closer to the Lexington area as opposed to the Louisville area, and there was one property that was in this small little town called Bloomfield, Kentucky. It was actually pending under contract with another buyer,. While we were in Kentucky that week, I believe, we found out that contract fell through.

We were thinking–should we actually go see it? Should we not go see it? It’s like an hour away, but we’re here. So maybe we should, might as well go and do it. And I was about to call it quits on that round of searching because we had looked at multiple properties where it looked great, but there was just something that felt kind of off. Caleb was very encouraging and said, “We’re here. We might as well go look. Let’s just give it a chance. Don’t write anything off.”

So we did. We went to Bloomfield, Kentucky to look at this beautiful 90-acre property and I fell in love even though I didn’t want to fall in love. On paper it checked every single box that we wanted it to check. There were places to have overnight guests. There was a place for a honeymoon suite. There was enough room that we could spread out and have tented weddings. A beautiful ceremony location overlooking this back pasture. There was a pond. There were rolling hills, places where we could put horses. There was a 5,000 square foot metal shop that could be renovated into a reception hall.

It literally checked all the boxes. So anyway, with the help of family, we did end up purchasing that property. And as we were preparing for closing, I was basically doing a deep dive and getting prepared for everything. My strength lies in branding and marketing, and I knew that in order to make this a viable business, I was going to have to market the hell out of it. So I really focused in the very beginning on creating a solid brand for this wedding venue, something that Central Kentucky didn’t have. My business plan was very thorough. It was in fact a 10-year plan that incorporated almost every member of our family. This was for sure going to be like a family affair. It was a really, really beautiful dream.

The Brand

I’m going to jump into a little bit of the brand story behind The Commonwealth, which is the name that we settled on after months of toiling over that. We decided on The Commonwealth Weddings and Events because I was born and raised in Virginia, which is one of the four Commonwealths in the United States.

The second commonwealth is Kentucky. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania round out those four. I really love the idea of incorporating our past with our present by finding similiarities in the states that we had that had been part of our story. And so that’s where the name The Commonwealth came from.

The property consisted of a main house, a guest house, and that 5,000 square foot shop. The main house was going to be the overnight accommodations for the bridal party. This house has five bedrooms. Of course, there are only four Commonwealths. So, four of those rooms were named after the Commonwealths of the United States. One was the Virginia Room, one was the Massachusetts Room, one was the Pennsylvania Room, and one was the Kentucky Room. We did have one room that was left over, of course, and that room was not used as a bedroom by the previous owners. It was used as a study. It was different colors than the rest of the house and had some dark wood, like cherry wood, wainscoting, so we made that more of like a masculine room and didn’t give it a name. The Commonwealth theme ran very deep throughout our brand. In the foyer, there’s marble floors like Italian marble floors and big beautiful columns. The marble floors are all in diamonds as well. So we used all of that within our logo and our technical brand.

My goal was to make this wedding venue the most luxurious wedding venue in central Kentucky. We wanted to host wedding weekends as opposed to wedding days. So the idea is that the couple would check in on Friday afternoon, they would host their rehearsal dinner and rehearsal of the ceremony right here on site, and then they would be able to sleep over with their bridesmaids or groomsmen in the main house, or family if they so choose. They would be able to get ready on site. They would be able to have their ceremony, their reception all on site. The night after their wedding, there was a separate structure where the bride and the groom could stay overnight to celebrate their wedding night and not have to be with the rest of their family and friends. Then that next morning, they could wake up, have their farewell brunch, and then be on their married way. See what I did there? We were creating this luxurious experience at the Commonwealth, and I just had grand dreams of a beautiful 10-year business plan that incorporated every member of our family.

We were going to start out as a tented wedding venue where you would be required to have the wedding reception under a sailcloth tent and once we started having revenue coming in we wanted to renovate the 5,000 square foot shop to be an Indoor wedding venue or reception area. That we could host events all year round and weren’t subjected to only hosting them in the warmer months. It was more of a grow small and grow steadily, as opposed to like throwing a ton of money at the renovations of the reception hall from the start.

If you were to fast forward the plan by four or five years, our goal was to transition me out of the venue manager position where I would be the CEO or the visionary of the company because there were going to be multiple streams of income.

The first was going to be the wedding venue. The second was we wanted to begin to purchase smaller properties to convert short term rentals. This is a very rural area of Kentucky. We’re about an hour from Louisville, an hour from Lexington and 30 minutes from Bardstown, which is where the nearest hotels are.

Finally, we are right in the heart of the Bourbon Trail and we wanted to be part of that culture. We really would have loved to build a micro distillery where our couples were able to pick out a barrel of bourbon that only their guests would ever be able to partake in.

The Build Up

So now I’m going to transition from the 10 year plan to the actual occurrence. You might wonder how in the world did any of this happen where you actually secured the property but then weren’t able to make it go through. At the time we were figuring it out as we went, but if nothing else, I am a planner and I do my due diligence anytime I’m diving into something new. And we did our due diligence.

We were in touch with the zoning administrator prior to the purchasing of the property. We did everything we could in order to make sure that this was going to be a viable plan. And so as we were figuring out what our next steps were. We were told that there should not be any issues having the conditional use permit go through. A conditional use permit is need any time there’s a piece of property being utilized in a way other than what it is zone for.

Common zoning classifications can be residential, commercial, industrial, agricultural. The property that we wanted to purchase was zoned agricultural. However, because we wanted to run a wedding venue on it, we were using it for a purpose that was not initially intended per the zoning. So to use it outside of its zoning laws or rules, we have to get what’s called a conditional use permit, and that process, I was under the impression, would be not necessarily easy, but a straightforward process. It was not.

We were told that the permit couldn’t be guaranteed, but based off of the other two venues in the county at the time, that no issues were anticipated. So, we go ahead with the offer to purchase the property, despite being told that we could not go through with the conditional use permit process prior to purchasing the property.

We were told that our names had to be on the title of the property prior to filing for that conditional use permit. I’m telling you all of this stuff because it’s pertinent to the story later on. So, we purchased the property, hit the ground running when we got here.

We wanted to go get that permit process underway as quickly as possible. And part of that process is notifying all of the neighbors that have adjoining property lines to you. We knew that those letters would be going out and we wanted to introduce ourselves prior to that happening. We wanted to show everyone that we were good humans and that we had everyone’s best interests at heart, that we weren’t coming in here from, you know, another place and trying to disrupt their lifestyles, that we were simply living out a dream of mine…and that didn’t go over well. We were not well received. Of the, I think, it’s 11 property owners, we were only able to speak with three of those. None of them seemed to care at the initial time of introduction and anyone else that we weren’t able to speak with, we left a letter in the flag of their mailboxes with our phone numbers, with our names, with our stories, so that we could be in touch with them if they wanted to ask us questions.

Within days of us doing that, there was a letter circulating to everyone within a two mile radius of our home to come and petition against us at the conditional use permit meeting. There were also signs at the end of our road and the end of the road that our road is off of that gave the date, time, and location of our permit hearing and told people to come and speak against us because we were bringing commerciali$m to the country. Yes, they used the dollar sign on the sign.

This was all within the first two weeks of us living here. Unfortunately, that first meeting got postponed because someone in the zoning office had COVID. So that gave everyone that did not want us to do a wedding venue, even more time to organize and strategize against us.

The Board Meetings

Going into that first meeting, once I saw those signs, I didn’t know what we just got ourselves into. We were under the impression that, like I said, it might not be an easy process, but it was relatively straightforward and no one else has ever had any issues with running a wedding venue on their property and we’re on 90 acres.

From that point on, I didn’t know whether I was going to be able to handle it myself. I knew the basics of real estate, but I obviously was not a real estate attorney, knowing the ins and outs. So we hired a real estate attorney. That attorney came with us to our first zoning meeting. Overall, there was not much help from him. When we arrived to the meeting, the parking lot was packed and we had both of our kids. We had two kids at the time and my husband had just started a new job and we didn’t have a child care provider at that point.

So all four of us packed up. We went to the meeting. My husband had the kids in the next room doing his best to keep them occupied while I was presenting all of this information to the board. We had 15 people, I believe, speak against us, which is the most in county history. Our first meeting lasted over two hours, and that was the longest in county history. We hit the ground running, breaking all kinds of county records from the moment we stepped into Kentucky.

That first meeting was riddled with concerns–some legitimate, some illegitimate. Here are some of the illegitimate concerns:

1. We were going to basically make the property into a music festival and have people popping up tents all over the 90 acres.
2. There was concern that we were going to have noise and light pollution that would affect them being able to hear the owls hoot at night.
3. There was concern that we would be attracting and bringing sex offenders to the area.

So, we were faced with a lot, and that meeting ended in a continuation to a second meeting, where I was required to get more information from county officials, such as the County Health Department for septic, the County Road Engineer to make sure the road could support the traffic that we were bringing, the County Engineer for other information.

I never would in my life would have thought that I knew what a QK4 test was until this time. So I had a lot of phone calls to make before the next meeting that was set to be in two weeks. It was a busy two weeks. Again, at this point we didn’t have childcare, so every phone call and meeting, I had two kids in tow.

Essentially what I was trying to tell the board was–of course we were trying to do our due diligence and doing everything the right way the first time. So yes, of course we planned on properly installing septic and going through the health department to do that. We were planning on making sure that there was ways not to have noise pollution go to our neighbors…

All of that was on our minds, but we weren’t going to invest the time, money, and extra resources into that if we weren’t going to be approved for the permit in the first place, which is why we came to get the permit first.

That second meeting. Oh, that second meeting. There were actually only two people that came to speak against us.

It was supposed to be a meeting that was open to the public, but not open to public comment. It was simply supposed to be me and the board discussing the concerns and the findings that I had researched from the county officials. Of course, that didn’t happen.

If we had learned anything from the first meeting, it was that protocol was not followed. We were told that everyone was able to speak for, I believe, it was four minutes one time. There were individuals that got up and spoke three to four times, some speaking upwards of 10 minutes each of their turns. It was just the wild west. No one was following directions, no one was enforcing any of the rules. It felt like I had gotten railroaded!

Then the second meeting, like I mentioned, was open to public, but not open to public comment. And still, people showed up and spoke, and the board allowed it! It was just wild to me that I felt like I was following all the rules and trying to do everything the right way, and essentially what it came down to was…I’m not from around here.

The overall vibe was: “You don’t know how things work around here, and because you’re from out of town, we don’t welcome you. And, we’re going to make it really hard for you to get this permit. Actually, you came really prepared and you did everything we asked you to do, so, we can’t not give it to you. But we’re going to give you 18 restrictions on this permit.”

Despite living on 90 acres, some of the restrictions were that we couldn’t have string lights because they were afraid of the extra light pollution. We couldn’t have outdoor music except for low music during an outdoor ceremony. Remember I told you my, my business plan from beginning was that we were going to start with outdoor tented wedding receptions so that we could then work our way up to renovating that reception hall.

Now, that couldn’t happen because of this permit. So that immediately is anywhere from $500,000 to $1,000,000 renovation that we’ll have to foot the bill with no income because we can’t have weddings without a reception hall, but we can’t do anything outside.

Many of the other restrictions were ones that we would have had to go through with other county officials, anyway, like the amount of people that we could have at an event, etc. It was just all a lot.

Then between those two meetings, I did a ton of research on the other two wedding venues. I pulled the minutes from those old meetings. The first one walked in and he had been a member of the community forever, like I think born and raised here, but his son wanted to do a wedding venue on their property and essentially they were like, “Okay, got to have the music off by this time.” And that was it. That was the only restriction.

The second one, as I was reading through the minutes, I thought it was very interesting because they said something about the closing date was approaching. So that tells me that they were filing for a conditional use permit on a property that they didn’t yet own, which I was told that I could not do.

Finally, that second venue was also allowed to start their wedding venue with a parking lot and a field. No gravel, no nothing. They were told that they had to have a gravel lot within a specific time frame, but they were allowed to have people parking in the grass. We were told that we had to have gravel to start with, and had to have it paved within a specific amount of time, which I believe that time frame was 18 months.

Do you know how much it would cost us to pave that within the first 18 months of our business after already having to renovate the reception hall right off the start? That would be another around $75,000 and that’s even with a discounted rate because my husband works a local paving company. So, now we are $1,075, 000 into this, and we haven’t even been able to start yet. That number is not including the purchase price of the property.

Now let me tell you how the meeting ended after we received our with 18 restrictions. One of our neighbors decided that it was a good idea to threaten us on public record. Because I have marked this as a non explicit show, I will replace any words that she used in a, uh, nice way. She said, as I had my back turned to her and was packing up my things to go get my kids in the next room, “If anything happens to my kids, it’ll be your last effing day on this earth. You’re not from around here. You don’t know how we do things.”

Then, after I got my things together, gathered myself in the next room, and started to walk out with my husband, my kids, and our attorney, an older gentleman decided to follow us to our vehicles to tell us that we are the monsters of Ashes Creek, which is the area where we live. He continued on to tell us that no one wants us here and that this won’t end well. I had no idea who this man was. He was not at the first meeting. Even if I wanted to file a police report, I couldn’t because he never signed in. I didn’t know where he lived. And I just need you guys for a second to put yourselves in my shoes as a mom of two.

Two young children, three and one at the time, having to go home and sleep on a property where I knew I wasn’t welcome and not know where the threat was coming from. So while I was just threatened about something happening to someone else’s kids while we run a wedding venue on our property, I now feel like I have to sleep with my kids in my bedroom because I was told that this won’t end well. My address is public record as well because I tried to do the right thing and go through with the conditional use permit process the way the county outlined.

This gave us a lot to think about. It affected our business plan. It affected our personal lives, our daily lives. Still, to this day, two years later, when we pass some of those neighbors on the road, we get flicked off. And it’s just so, so crazy that I couldn’t have a decent conversation even. And it just makes me so sad. And, you know, I felt like there was a little bit of a win in there because we got the permit, right?

That’s what we wanted. But at the same time I was like, “I don’t know how we’re going to be able to make this happen. We don’t have a million bucks to throw into this renovation. And even if we did, our neighbors could see when people were coming to the venue and they all have shooting ranges surrounding our 90 acres, and they clearly all know each other. So, they are able to communicate and anticipate when the ceremonies would be, and start target practice during the ceremonies. They could run their four wheelers while ceremonies were going. They could sabotage us in many, many ways, and I knew after that meeting that we had a target on our backs and they would probably do anything within their power to be able to make us fail.

Despite all this, I was still meeting with contractors through, I want to say February, to start figuring out how we were going to renovate the reception hall, how we were going to install the trees that needed to be installed to buffer the noise, which was also a requirement on the permit, how we were going to move the driveway, how we were going to make sure that we were abiding everything like by ADA standards and Compliance and all of that. So, that puts us into January or February of 2022.

But I think everyone around me knew it. That it wasn’t gonna happen. But I was in denial. I wanted this so badly that I was willing to be blind to the truth. So, it was in about April of 2022 when I finally opened my eyes or was ready to see the truth. That was, this wedding venue is not going to work.

Let me rephrase. It could work, but it wasn’t going to be the venue that I had in my 10 year plan. It wasn’t going to be the luxurious exclusive experience that I thought it was going to be, that it could be. It was going to be just another barn venue. And that was that, just another barn venue. It wasn’t going to pay the bills, wasn’t going to do what I needed it to do for our family.

The BNB

So that’s when we decided to pivot. And that pivot looked like an Airbnb. So that we could bide our time, pay the bills, and figure out what our next steps were going to be. I want to add that we found out we were pregnant with our third child in December of 2021, so I was over halfway through the pregnancy in April when I decided that we were going to do Airbnb. He was due in the beginning of August, and so we had then another timeline that we were kind of working against. So it was in April that we made the decision to convert the big house, or the main house, into the Airbnb, and our family of four at the time, was moving into the guest house.

The guest house is about 900 square feet. It’s two bedrooms. So the big kids that I now so lovingly call them, were going to be sharing a room and it was then our bedroom and a bathroom and a kitchen/living space. In May 2022 we moved over to the guest house. July I had all of the furniture ready and the Airbnb was ready to go.

I had contacted the zoning board and said, “I had permission on the initial wedding venue permit to have a certain amount of guests stay overnight. Am I good to go on an Airbnb?” Because that had been a conversation in the initial meeting as well. And I was told, “Yes, you’re good to go.” So we started opening the books in July of 2022.

Emerson, our youngest son, came on August 19th, and I had to have an emergency C-section with my son in mid August. Thankfully, we’re both here. The doctor saved our lives. But I wasn’t able to climb the stairs to the guest house to get upstairs to heal and take care of him. So we blocked out the dates for my recovery at the big house and we stayed over there.

However, we had hosted our first round of guests in July. The neighbors immediately were adamantly against that. They took screenshots of my Instagram, they took pictures of our house with cars in front of it, they screenshotted the Airbnb listing and turned us into the planning and zoning board. The planning and zoning board told us that we had to come in again for another conditional use permit specifically for short term rentals that were not on Fridays and Saturdays.

This whole saga was like it was never going to end and we were just trying to pay the bills. I was hugely overdue pregnant, and I was going into the zoning office to make sure I had all the right paperwork so that we could schedule the next meeting.

Around that same time, the venue that I told you about initially where the son wanted to conduct a venue on their property–that venue, at this point, has been in business, I believe, 10 or 12 years. So they’re reputable around the area, and they went in for an addendum to their permit so that they could have overnight guests with an 8-bed, 8-bath house renovation and a new pool.

They were in and out in 15, maybe 20, minutes. I harbor no resentment towards the owners. I think it’s a great idea. It was my idea. But I was just astounded. I actually attended that meeting at like 9.5 months pregnant in July. It was just incredible to me to see the difference in the way I was treated versus the way they were treated.

Anywho, I had baby Emerson in August and then about less than a month postpartum, I had to have somebody watch my three-week-old baby to go back to another Conditional Use Permit hearing because I didn’t feel safe bringing him to that meeting after everything that had happened the last time we were there. And we still had people come and speak against us!

At least that time I wasn’t threatened. I mean, I guess that’s a silver lining and we were approved to run the Airbnb the way that we pretty much wanted to run the Airbnb, but those same neighbors tried to use our unborn child against us. As far as the guest count goes, they were like, they were approved for a certain amount of people, and now they’re four people living on property, soon to be five people. They were doing anything to try and put a roadblock in front of us. It was just devastating. Devastating.

I vividly remember it was one of the first days that Caleb had gone back to work after I had Emerson, and I was finally able to climb the stairs to the guest house. It was one of my first days at home with all three kids by myself, and the neightbors decided they wanted to have target practice. Fine, it’s free country–do what you want. It did impact me because I had, you know, three young kids, one of which I was breastfeeding, and another one I was trying to get down for a nap. I was breastfeeding one, and my son got scared when they shot off tannerite, which if you don’t know what tannerite is, it sounds like an actual bomb going off.

And it scared him so much that he bit my scar, my like fresh three week old C-section scar. He bit me because he was trying to hide his face in my stomach after the tannerite went off that sounded like a bomb. Then I had a four-year-old daughter asking me if our house was going to blow up someday.

The Part Where It Gets Better

Let’s fast forward to now–we run a successful Airbnb and much of that craziness has calmed down. We’re still not really on speaking terms with any of them, but to my knowledge, we’ve not been referred back to planning and zoning for any either legitimate or made up infractions of the rules that were set forth on the Airbnb permit.

But it has been a hard two years of trying to understand the failure. As a Type A planner who thought she had all of her bases covered and had created this beautiful brand, this idea, this vision, this dream. To have it all pulled out from under me for circumstances that were beyond my control is devastating.

I’ve learned a lot. We’ve grown a lot as a family of five now. Literally our family has grown, but also emotionally our family has grown. We’ve lived in 900 square feet all together since May of 2022. So, two, almost two years now. And we’ve figured it out. We’ve learned a lot.

One of the major lessons that I’ve learned from this is that you have to stop viewing any occurrence as a failure or a success. Otherwise you’ll probably slide into a deep, dark entrepreneurial hole or personal hole.

I have to look at this as an experiment. We made an educated decision. We did our best to figure out what was going to work for this space, for this county, for our family. And it didn’t work. So now I have data points to back that up and move forward in the future. But that transition and mindset of it’s not success or failure–it’s an experiment to collect data points. That was pivotal because I felt like I failed.

I actually remember sitting on the couch with my husband when we were deciding whether or not to make this into an Airbnb. And I said, “I think this is my story. This is our story. Every entrepreneur or entrepreneurial family has the story of when they thought it was the end. But instead of it being the end, it was just a really rocky beginning. And I don’t know what the next chapters are gonna look like, but I have to believe that this is part of the story.” And that’s exactly how I view it now.

The second thing that I learned was that I have to let the data tell me when it’s time to pivot. Because it’s really, really easy to let ego get in the way. But I beg of you, do not let your ego get in the way. I also remember another conversation with my husband and with one of my best friends, Kassie. I had the same conversation with both of them and I said, “I think it’s my pride. I think my pride is louder than my logic right now.”

A recent conversation with my friend, Kassie, she told me, “No, we all knew that it was eventually going to come to this. We just didn’t know when you were going to know. You had to know on your own.”

And when I finally sat down and said, “Okay, this is the original vision that I set forth…based off of the conditions that we now have, or the circumstances that we now have, am I going to be able to make this happen?” And the answer was no. But it was really, really hard to acknowledge that answer. I had to sit down and look at it black and white and remove any bit of emotion and that was really hard for me.

The next thing I learned was that I had to realize when the business or even the idea of the business was taking a toll on other areas of my life that were unrelated to that business. I said we grew closer as a family, but that didn’t come without its challenges either.

I felt like I was shouldering a lot of the sentiment of failure on my own shoulders, and that was very isolating for my husband. I thankfully had a very awesome childcare provider that came to our home, three days a week throughout most of this process. And I felt like I couldn’t function without her. My role as a mother was suffering because I was pouring everything I had into this business that wasn’t going to go anywhere, but I hadn’t acknowledged that it wasn’t going to go anywhere yet. So all of the areas outside of my business life were suffering.

A little bit more backstory to like my business background: I was a wedding photographer. That’s what got me into the wedding world. I completely stopped taking weddings once we started the wedding venue venture because obviously I couldn’t be shooting a wedding and running a wedding at the venue at the same time. So there was a huge gap in income now that we weren’t replacing my wedding photography business income with the wedding venue income, so this was devastating our finances as well. At some point you have to learn when to wave the white flag and pivot and start a new plan, and that’s what happened in April when we decided to go to an Airbnb.

The final lesson that I would love to impart or include in this episode is that I’m here to tell you that anything is a season. Whatever it is you’re going through, it’s a season. Even if it’s a good season, enjoy the good in that season. But if it’s a bad season, know that it’s only temporary. That season does not have to define you.

Although I wouldn’t say that I am totally on the other side of this season, I’m on the upswing of the season, and it’s a relief. I don’t know how else to say it, but…it’s not like an immediate release of pressure off my chest, but I can now feel like I can start to breathe again. Now that I’m acknowledging that it’s not going to work, that we are taking steps forward to be able to create a new chapter and let this just be that–a chapter of our story and not the whole story.

I actually got my real estate license to be able to be the listing agent on this property. So the property is at this moment on the market. If you know of anyone that wants to move to Central Kentucky, as long as you’re not running a business on this property, it’s a really beautiful property to be part of.

I still find myself kind of lamenting the fact that we had quotes given to us for building homes on this property, so we could also live here. This property backs up to Taylorsville Lake, and although there’s not have access to the lake because it’s an Army Corps lake, you can still have the view of the lake, and I was just so excited to have a lake view for our home.

This property has a lot of potential if you’re using it within agricultural purposes. I know that I haven’t really sold it well here, but it is a breathtaking home. Homes. Plural. It’s been quite the entrepreneurial journey here in central Kentucky throughout the last two years. But I’d like to think that we are coming out on top with an incredible story and an even stronger marriage and family for it.

I hope this answers some of your questions about our time in Kentucky and our adventure with the wedding venue. I really appreciate the time you took to read our story, and I hope you found some love and light in it.