When Luke Combs picked the day he planned on proposing to his longtime girlfriend, Nicole Hocking, he had no idea how much could go wrong. The North Carolina native planned on popping the question the day they moved from the apartment they shared to their newly-purchased home, but things definitely didn’t go according to plan.

“We hired a moving company to move all of our stuff from the apartment to the new house,” Luke recalled on the Couple Things podcast. “In the meantime, we went to my manager’s house to spend the day there, while they were moving all the stuff. It’s about an hour apart. We had to bring the cats with us; we have two cats. The cats do not travel well. Her cat peed in the cat. My cat threw up in the crate. So that was awesome.”

By the time Luke and Nicole made it back to their house, it was late at night, and they still had boxes of stuff everywhere. While Luke admits it wasn’t the ideal time to propose, his future in-laws were flying in the next day, and Nicole had to get up early for work. Unfortunately for Luke, he had already told her parents that he was going to ask her before they arrived, so there was no turning back. Luke planned on putting her ring around her cat’s neck, but since the cat was in desperate need of a bath, Luke had to quickly rethink his plans.

“I have to ask her at this point,” Luke recalled. “I pretty much just tell her what I was going to do.”

“He was like, ‘I got these collars for the cats, new collars with the new address on it, and I also got you this,'” Nicole recalled. “He pulls it out, gets down on one knee, does the whole thing. I black out, I don’t remember this. And I was just like, ‘My ears are hot. What’s going on?’

“That’s what she said,” Luke continued. “My ears are hot.”

Nicole did answer Luke’s question, once she was able to speak again.

“It’s a lot,” Nicole admitted. “I wasn’t expecting it at all. Not in the least bit, especially in that moment. Obviously I said yes.”