My wedding might not make it into Vogue, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t make it into KITPLANES! I’ll start by saying Brian and I are so glad we decided to get married on our own turf, surrounded by our closest friends and family. We said “I do” in our backyard in front of the Hickman Cessna 140, dined in our hangar, cut cake atop our vintage Snap-on toolbox, danced on the concrete pad outside our hangar door and charged the runway at sunset. The weather was perfect—low temp for late August, stunning cloud coverage.
As mentioned in previous pieces, we’ve been working tirelessly on our place since we bought it in 2022. We’ve had little to no hired help and albeit exhausting, we couldn’t be happier with our decision to fix it up ourselves—I suppose this makes us “homebuilders.” There were times we wished we’d booked a venue to avoid putting added pressure on ourselves, but having the wedding at our house not only allowed us to showcase the progress we’ve made, but it also helped fill the space with love and lasting memories.
Thankfully our actual wedding day went off without a hitch, but it took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to prime us for success. In fact, I expelled all three the Thursday before our big day when I took a C-140 aileron to the face. I was placing a pizza order over the phone and didn’t notice Brian pulling the airplane in behind me—I turned to begin pacing (as one does) and decked it. Our moms insisted it was an omen of good luck, but I couldn’t exactly nod in agreement, mostly because my neck hurt. Thankfully my makeup artist was able to plaster over the half-diamond-shaped indent on my forehead.
We tried to complete all of the wedding to-dos well in advance, but there were still a handful of boxes we couldn’t check until the week of, such as finalizing the bar. Brian’s parents loaned us their commercial kegerator, which holds up to six kegs and required three Van’s employees to lift it. They even tested the beer to ensure it wasn’t poisonous—now that’s full service! There were also final touches we made that weren’t planned, like kegging margaritas to make life easier for the bartender and slicing a bajillion limes to garnish said margs.
There was an ungodly amount of rotten apples, pears and grass clippings that needed to be bagged up and hauled away (since our burn pile became the aisle), tablecloths that required ironing, trim boards that needed painting and, you know, an overall deep cleaning of everything in sight. There were Hickmans and Rayments on the ground, on the roof, in the hangar, in the house. Needless to say, we wouldn’t have gotten through wedding week without the help of our friends and family—cheers to them!
Hangar Updates
I am happy to report that we completed every hangar project listed in my last column. Here’s a recap: We installed new LED ceiling lights, removed the (decrepit) bathroom entirely, re-sided the front of the building and painted the entire outside of it. We also replaced the old, rotting support posts that make up the exterior awnings with cedar ones—the place is looking fresh. There is a shop in the northeast corner of our hangar where we stored everything we didn’t want visible during the reception. I must admit, as I write this three months post-wedding, most everything is still in the shop and we’re not planning on tackling that mess anytime soon. We’ve earned a break, right?
As far as wedding decor goes, the chandeliers my mom and I overhauled turned out fantastic. I painted them black, installed clear glass covers and my mom decorated them with fake foliage. Brian strung Edison lights across the ceiling and most excitedly, we had an aluminum bar sign made that says “Workman Airpark.” I didn’t want it to be wedding-specific so that we could keep it up forever, so I opted to rip off the infamous downtown Portland sign. I drew it up in a computer program called Inkscape, which isn’t the most user-friendly, but unfortunately I’ve spent far too much time toying around with it that I can’t use anything else because that would just be too easy. Once I was satisfied with the design, I sent a PDF to Brian and he added tabs so that it’d stay together and converted it to a DXF file. Then he uploaded it to an online custom sheet metal fabrication service called SendCutSend, which he’s used for Van’s stuff. We mounted it to another piece of steel (that miraculously appeared from one of our works) and added lights.
August 24, 2024
At last, after months and months of planning, it was Saturday, Aug. 24. Time to get married! My two best friends barreled in around 9:00 a.m. with Starbucks and pastries and we started getting ready—grooms have it so easy, don’t they? Now what I’m about to say should come as no surprise, but I’ll admit I was still a little stunned. Mid-makeover my coordinator entered my office and whispered, “Brian and his brother have taken on another project.”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this family I’m now married into, it’s that they can’t sit still. I would later find that Brian and Jeffrey got up early to string Edison lights around our hangar pad to delineate the dance floor—something I wanted all along, but had assumed we’d run out of time for, because we, well, did. The mission apparently required some real engineering because they had to figure out how to keep the tension in the cables from pulling the poles over. In the end, it was no skin off my back and I was grateful they made it happen. There were no other surprises that morning and if there were, I didn’t hear about them—my coordinator and her team knocked it out of the park.
Guests started arriving around 4:00 p.m. and I could see them from my guest room window. They were taking selfies with the C-140, something I hadn’t anticipated, but a real treat to witness. I didn’t grow up in a flying family so to be able to share this magical life of mine with those who don’t know much about airplanes was really special. I’ve known most of my friends since elementary school, a rarity, so they’ve seen just how far I’ve come. This is who I am now and as you can see by my house this aviation thing is all-encompassing.
Our dear friend Rion Bourgeois was our officiant or “Dudest Priest,” a title given to him by the Church of the Latter-Day Dude—a story for another time, Lebowski. We knew we could trust him with this sacred task because he runs our EAA Chapter 105 meetings and is no stranger to public speaking. Brian has known him since he was a little kid and I of course have known him about as long as I’ve known Brian. For those who don’t know, Brian and I met while working at Glasair. It all started when I was tasked with running the vinyl cutter and making N-numbers for the Two Weeks to Taxi airplanes but needed an engineer’s help converting text files to CAD. Brian appeared and then kept reappearing. We’d print, weed and apply the decals and I couldn’t help but notice how well we worked together. And how tall he was. Seven years later, here we are, still finding new things to work on, still learning from each other. I’m thankful for every moment that led me here and for the person I get to share this life with. I love you, Brian.
