Hayley and Andrew are ready to buy a home, but they’re also eager to get married. Find out if the Netflix stars chose ‘Marriage or Mortgage’ in AfterBuzz TV’s exclusive interview with the couple!
Hayley and Andrew Thoen are a match made in Music City. Both working for record labels in Nashville, the two met through mutual friends in the music industry and instantly hit it off.
“Andrew’s the nicer, prettier, smarter version of me,” Hayley said on the show.
“That’s not true!” Andrew said.
After getting engaged in 2018, Hayley and Andrew are more than ready to get married–but they also want a house. As leaders in their church, they’ve taken a vow of celibacy and though they currently share an apartment together with one of Andrew’s friends, Andrew leaves at night to stay with friends. Though the pressure is on to get married, they also want the space to host small groups at their house. How to decide? Netflix!
Hayley and Andrew are stars of its new reality hit Marriage or Mortgage, where realtor Nichole Holmes and wedding planner Sarah Miller show them houses and weddings they could achieve with their budget.
“Both Nichole and Sarah were truly, truly, truly lovely,” Hayley raved about their experience. “They just made the whole thing fun and easy.”
Though the couple loved the filming process, Sarah and Nichole sure didn’t make their decision easy! Nichole showed them three houses with space to host their friends, and Nichole helped bring their dream boho-chic wedding to life. At the end of the day though, it was moving into a home together that took precedence for Hayley and Andrew.
“When we walked in the home that we bought there was just this wave of peace and it was nothing like we thought we were going to be able to get, but everything we wanted,” Hayley said. “I think you can kind of see it in my face; when I walked through the door, I looked around and I just kinda felt that this was going to be our home.”
Building a home
Though the home was a dream come true, the bright blue paint definitely wasn’t, so Hayley and Andrew went to work adding their own personal touches to make the house theirs.
“Nichole gave us our keys and we went to town,” Hayley said. “My father is a painter and so he flew in and just cranked out our house; Andrew and him did our house in like three or four days, and that just made everything better. As soon as it was the color we wanted, the rest just kind of started to fall into place.”
They both agree their favorite feature of their new home is the deck and spacious backyard.
“It’s like almost a little nature preserve,” Andrew said. “You can look out our master bedroom windows and you can see cardinals and robins and chipmunks and squirrels. We actually put a security camera in the backyard and at night we’ve gotten notifications that record a little bit of something that sets off the motion sensor, and one night we saw a deer on our deck just chilling.”
“I love our backyard and just how peaceful it is; I mean, it’s in a Nashville suburb, but it still does kind of feel like we’re out in the woods.”
Since moving in, they’ve gotten to enjoy their first Christmas together and are already making new memories with friends, both favorite times the couple have shared in their new home.
“We got to decorate our house for Christmas and do Christmas morning, just the two of us. That was a dream for me,” Hayley said.
“I think my favorite memory actually is when we drove up to Hayley’s house last summer in Pennsylvania and when we got home, we were surprised by a bunch of our friends–some of whom you actually see gathered at our house at the end of our episode–and they surprised us when we got home,” Andrew said. “We all just got to hang out together as a little family and I think that was the first time that we really had a friend gathering like that.”
Where are they now?
As it turns out, Hayley and Andrew didn’t just get the dream home; they also had their dream wedding! As of October 10, 2020, they’re officially Mr. and Mrs. Thoen.
“We had a small ceremony with the people most important to us. It was absolutely perfect,” Andrew shared.
Similarly to landing their dream home, which originally was under contract with another buyer before falling out of contract, pulling off the perfect wedding happened in a seemingly miraculous twist of fate.
“Our whole wedding was outside. We just wanted it to be as safe as possible…and then a hurricane came through the day of our wedding,” Hayley said. “But I kid you not, it stopped.”
“We prayed hard. We had all of our friends praying that somehow the weather would turn,” Andrew added. “And no joke, 4:00 pm on the dot, which is when I was supposed to walk out and walk up to the altar, at 4:00 pm I walk out and literally the clouds part. The sun came out, there were sunbeams pointing down. I talk about a God thing in the show, and our wedding in and of itself was a God thing.”
Both Hayley and Andrew are grateful for their experience on the show, and that both the wedding and house worked out.
“We told them, ‘We understand if we can’t get this house, but this is our dream house,’ and Nichole was like, ‘Well, then we’ve gotta move! You guys have got to make a decision,’” Hayley said. “So our wedding was very similar in the fact that this house should not be ours and it is.”
Hayley and Andrew’s episode along with all of season one of Marriage or Mortgage is streaming on Netflix now. For more news from the couples, keep following AfterBuzz TV.
