by Clint Harp
“Hi, Clint, it’s Elizabeth,” the call began. “I also have Dan and Bill on the line. Dan is a professor with his Ph.D. in physics, and Bill is an engineer. Both do woodworking on the side and wanted to be a part of this project. I’ll let them explain what we want.”
Oh dear God. Why in the world were they calling me, then? That opener alone was enough to give me a panic attack, but I played along. Over the next twenty minutes, they described what they had in mind, and I scribbled notes. Before we signed off, I agreed to give them a price in the next few days.
For a carpenter or any other kind of artisan, pricing your own work is one of the most complicated parts of the job. Price it too high, and it may seem that you think you’re Picasso. If your client accepts a high price, it’s no surprise when his or her expectation level is sometimes off the charts to match that price. On the other hand, price your work too low, and you won’t be able to afford to eat. And while your client will likely be grateful to get such a killer deal, and probably won’t be too picky in the end, he or she will spread the word about your low price and you’ll be inundated with orders for complicated pieces for pitiful pay. It’s a real challenge.
I did my best to figure out a price. I wanted to get it just right so I wouldn’t have a physics professor and an engineer breathing down my neck. I didn’t know yet that they would turn out to be two incredibly kind and relatable people with fair expectations, nothing like my projection of them, but that’s what fear does: it turns you into a crazy person. Anyway, after talking it over with Kelly, I decided to quote on the higher side. Swallowing hard, I told them, “I can do it for two thousand dollars total.” The whole time I was thinking, Am I really asking someone to pay me thousands when I’ve never made more than seven hundred dollars for one piece? For me, that was a giant leap. And it’s one I’m glad I dared to take, because the potential clients said yes at once. I couldn’t believe it.
Not long after, I found the greatest pallets ever: Kelly and I got reacquainted with the Ogdens, old Waco friends from our Baylor days who happened to own an industrial belting company. The pallets their raw materials were shipped on were constructed of six-foot-long oak and pecan boards. I let the church know I’d make the hutch and cabinet out of this lumber. They loved the idea. When it was all said and done, I delivered the pieces to Austin half proud of what I’d created and half surprised I had actually pulled it off. My clients were pleased and my confidence was bolstered.
As more orders for tables and custom work trickled in, we were still living in our cramped apartment. With Kelly pregnant, the thought of three kids in a small two-bedroom gave us both hives.
“Clint, I know this is going to sound crazy,” Kelly told me one afternoon when she came home from class, “but I think I’ve found a house I want.”
“Like, to rent?” I asked
“No, like, to buy,” she said.
“Yes, you’re right,” I told her. “That does sound crazy.”
“Hear me out,” she said. “It’s a little white cottage close to Castle Heights, not far from here. It has a ‘For Sale’ sign out front. I think we could renovate it and make it so cute!”
As an aside, we never bought that pink house in Waco we’d once daydreamed of renovating. Sure, we’d been bold enough to give the Realtor a call, but except for Kelly’s mutual fund from her grandmother (which we had strictly agreed would not be bail-out cash but rather saved for an investment as her grandmother had wished), we had no money. Maybe, we reasoned, if we could find someone crazy enough to give us a loan, we could use the mutual fund as a down payment. We gave the Realtor a seriously lowball offer, something like $45,000. That got us nowhere with the owners, so we had to pass. Yet in the end, that pink house more than served its purpose for us. And when the little white cottage appeared on our radar, we jumped out on a limb once again, this time knowing we were being led somewhere great even if we didn’t know where.
“Well,” I said, “Chip was telling me the other day that we should buy a house. He even has a banker he’d introduce us to. Honestly, what he was saying made sense, when you consider how much we’re paying in rent. Then again, I’m not sure anyone would loan us money. But why not give it a shot?”
Chip’s friend Joe Nesbitt had worked with the Gaineses for several years as they bought and sold houses all around town, which had to have been much easier to do in those prerecession days. A Baylor grad and Waco native, Joe loved the idea of people investing in his beloved city. “You won’t find an easier person to work with,” Chip told me as he gave me Joe’s number. The next day, I called Joe up and asked if he could help us get a home loan.
Joe is an amazing guy—big personality, insanely dry sense of humor, and a great heart. “I’d love to help you!” he said right away. “Let’s do it! I’ll tell you what. I’ll have my assistant email you a loan app. You fill that out and we’ll go from there.”
Right. A loan app. Welp, there goes that idea, I thought. But I filled it out anyway. I’ll always remember this on the form:
Total Cash Amount in Checking Account(s): $615
Total Cash Amount in Savings Account(s): $0
The one bright spot on that application was the $12,000 mutual fund from Kelly’s grandmother. That was it. I filled out the form with our car loan information, my student loan, how much we paid in rent, and the amounts we owed on our credit cards (we now had a second one that was almost maxed out). I laughed out loud and shook my head skeptically as I hit “send” on the email.
A couple of days later, Joe called. “Hey, Clint,” he said. “I got all your info, and you should put an offer on that house right away, okay? We’re gonna make this happen, bud. Go get ’em!”
I was beyond shocked. I called Kelly and we both freaked out. We couldn’t believe it. I texted Chip to say thanks and after that called the Realtor. A couple of weeks later, we were under contract. For a solid month after we closed I ripped into that house, trying my best to pull off Kelly’s design plan. She and the kids would bring lunch and dinner over and we’d have a picnic. From that tiny backyard, we’d stare at our little house and feel like it was a castle.
On the weekend of July Fourth, we moved into our 1,390-square-foot home with two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a closed-in side porch that we would turn into a third bedroom. We were thrilled. Over the next five years, Joe Nesbitt, through many other projects, would cement his place in our “People We Couldn’t Have Done This Without” Hall of Fame. He was a part of the miracle, among so many others.
Some years totally transform the playing field. For us, 2012 was that year. We’d started by relocating to Waco to chase a crazy dream. By March, I’d made an incredible connection at a gas station, landed my very first customer, and opened a shop. Before the start of summer, I’d learned to turn a leg and somehow sold six pieces, along with that hutch and cabinet for the church in Austin. And at year’s end, Kelly and I received a gift far greater than all of those events combined. A week before Christmas, Camille Harp kicked her way into the world. Named after my father’s mother, that little angel would be our second girl and the beloved closing punctuation mark on our family.
But a few months before we welcomed Camille—and just when we thought our year couldn’t get any more insane—Joanna stopped by my shop with an announcement that would turn everything on its head.
CHAPTER 11
* * *
Varying Grits
Use the right grit of sandpaper, and you’re gold. Use the wrong grit, and it can kick you in the pants by creating more work. When I first started building, for instance, I used 60 grit on everything: hardwood, soft wood, new or old, 60 grit was my leadoff batter. By the time I got to applying stain, I would find little swirly sanding marks all over my tabletop and be screaming at the carpentry gods for once again foiling my hard work. Thanks to a chat with my woodworking brother-in-law, Jonty, I changed my ways. The grits you choose will vary depending on the type of wood you’re working with. If you’re sanding a
rough piece with deep grains, you might start with 60-grit sandpaper, which essentially means the paper has 60 abrasive particles per square inch. You might even pull out the belt sander and use 36 grit, which is even more intense. Or maybe you want to leave all those glorious marks and that wonderful character, so you skip straight to 120 or 150, or better yet to 220, in order to clean it up a bit, to knock off some splinters without getting rid of all the natural character the wood displays. It’s a tricky dance. But when you use the correct grit, you can make a piece of wood do whatever you want it to do.
“Hey, Clint, how’s it going?” Joanna said as she walked into my shop.
“It’s good,” I said. “Busy for sure. What about you? What’s up in the Gaineses’ world?”
“Oh, you know,” she said. “Things are crazy as always. Actually, I got an email from this guy the other day. He said he’d seen a blog post about me on a national design blog called Design Mom. My friend Molly Winn [a local photographer who’d become a friend of ours as well] had submitted pictures to the blog, and they ended up doing a cool write-up on me. Anyway, this guy who reached out, he works for a TV production company out of Colorado. And he wants to develop an idea for a possible show to pitch to HGTV.”
On the outside, I played it cool: a subtle smile accompanied by some heartfelt well-wishes. But on the inside, I was running around in circles with my hair on fire. What!?!! You’ve got to be kidding me! OH. MY. LORD. YES! You guys are going to kill it! And if you need a carpenter . . . I mean . . . Hi! . . .
“Wow, Jo, that is so awesome!” I said. “Congratulations.”
After that conversation, it was a waiting game. And a game of survival. Although we were making a bit of money from the projects I’d taken on, we still had kids to feed and bills mounting. Kelly’s stipend had run out and we knew she wouldn’t get another; she’d decided to step away from her studies to take care of newborn Camille and invest time in our growing small business. We also now owned a house that came with a mortgage. Things were as tight as ever, and we started to wonder if we’d made the right move. And in the back of my mind sat the possibility that Joanna had put on the table. She might one day have her own television show on HGTV, and I could maybe, just maybe, build her some pieces for that show. Part of me knew it was a long shot: there was no telling whether she’d even get the show, or if she’d want me on it. But another part of me, a much bigger part, was hoping. Meanwhile, Chip and Jo worked with the production company to create a sizzle reel—a ten-minute promo video that served as a snapshot of the show being pitched.
Whenever Joanna would stop by the shop, she’d give me updates: “Yeah, we’re still waiting to hear” or “I got an email saying the person who makes the decision is out of town” or “They won’t have their meeting on new show ideas for a few weeks.” The waiting game was tough for me, so it must’ve been excruciating for Chip and Joanna. As Kelly and I would discover years later, television was one of those industries where you put yourself out there and then leave it all in the hands of people who are looking at a hundred other ideas that are not always that much different from yours—and you sit by the phone.
Until one day, seemingly out of nowhere, you get an answer. “Clint,” Joanna told me one afternoon, “they liked our sizzle reel and they want to do a pilot!” And then, as she turned to go, she casually uttered the sentence that blew me away: “You ready to build some tables on TV?”
I called Kelly as soon as Joanna left the shop. “Not only are they going to make a pilot,” I told her, “but Jo has invited me to be in it!”
It was surreal. The pilot—tentatively titled Fixer Upper—would feature Chip and Joanna as they remodeled a home from top to bottom for a client in the Waco area. Somewhere in the midst of tearing down walls, designing, and tiling bathrooms and backsplashes, Jo would need me to build something. What she’d need, I had no idea—something big, something small, or maybe even multiple somethings. Regardless of what she asked of me, I would just have to do what I always did—figure it out.
* * *
As they counted down to the start of filming, Joanna and I kept working. We hammered out a style for her farmhouse look and sold it to anyone who would buy it. Without thinking about it, we established the designer-builder relationship that would one day be on display for the world to see. Some of our ideas worked, some didn’t, but we forged ahead. I collected pallets all around Waco and dragged them back to my shop, piecing together as many farm tables as I could. With sales picking up a bit, I bought an affordable single-axle ten-foot trailer to haul my pallet discoveries.
It was during these months that some of my fondest memories with the Gaineses were made. There was the time Kelly, Chip, Joanna, and I sat in my shop with all our kids eating sandwiches from a local Waco favorite, Schmaltz’s Sandwich Shoppe. We were all kind of quiet, just wondering what in the world we were all getting into and how it was all going to work out. There were the times Chip and I went to lunch and just talked about how crazy it was to even have the chance at a pilot episode, and that if it worked, great, but if not, well, we’d be okay.
And there was the time when Chip and Jo were deciding whether to buy a farmhouse in the country just outside of town. Chip and Jo, as I’d come to learn, didn’t say no to a challenge very often. Being someone who loves a good ol’-fashioned challenge myself, I can relate. As we sat there, Chip surprised me when he asked me—a guy who was still clearly trying to figure out his own life—for my opinion on the farmhouse.
“All I’ve thought about lately is what God might have us do with this whole farm thing,” he said. “Just curious . . . what do you think?”
“Huh. I don’t really know what you should do.” I thought for a second. “But in my opinion . . . well . . . I don’t think God cares. I really don’t. I mean why would God care if you buy a farm? It’s land and a house and money. I think God just cares if you try. I don’t think God cares who wins football games, Grammy awards, or the Nobel Peace Prize, but I’m guessing God enjoys watching people pour everything into scoring a touchdown, writing a song, or taking humanity to the next level. So, yeah, go buy the farm if you really want to. And, hey, if it all blows up in your face, I think God will be in the front row giving you a standing ovation for trying. . . . I know I will.”
Isn’t it great when you’re talking to someone in a way that you hope they’d talk to you? Not sure if Chip could tell, but I was dying for someone to say that to me. We can live a structured life that’s within bounds, but there’s also an option to go out and live a totally uncharted life. As far as we know, this is the only life we have. And when I sat and had lunch with Chip that day, it was clear I was only interested in making the most of that life.
And that life had come with plenty of surprises. I mean, what were the chances that a random producer would happen to run across a blog post featuring Joanna? And how did a guy like me, who didn’t even know how to use a lathe until recently, get a shot at appearing on a national series? Nowadays, new shows seem to pop up all over the place; follow a few production companies on social media, and you’ll hear about new pilot releases a few times a month. With Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube, and all the others, there’s a new show around every corner and countless more in the idea stages. But back in 2011 when I quit my job—and before people were getting discovered on social media left and right—that wasn’t the case. The possibility of a TV show was the last thing on my mind. I was busy setting up a quiet place in my garage with no lights, cameras, or people watching.
All that being said, the excitement of the pilot being filmed did light up the part of me that naturally gravitates toward entertaining. Up to that point, I’d spent much of my life in front of people. Whether taking on a starring role in a play or musical (which I did during high school), leading worship for ten people or two thousand with my acoustic guitar, acting in a short film, or even making presentations and forging connections for my previous sales jobs, I had so often been in the spotlight. And th
en I’d decided to shift from this public person into a solitary craftsman, toiling away to build furniture in his shop. Which consequently meant officially setting aside the biggest aspiration of my youth: pursuing a musical career.
My last musical hoorah had come after we’d returned from Paris and settled in Dallas. Kelly and I went to a Coldplay concert. I got us tickets right by the stage, and we could’ve sworn Chris Martin’s sweat landed on our faces. It was glorious—everything I ever wanted in a concert. We left there and went to a late-night diner, where we sat and talked about how magical the experience had been, and how we wanted to live a life that felt magical. The next day, I went and bought a microphone and set up a small recording studio in our guest bedroom. I pulled out pen and paper and sat down to write some songs. Nothing came. In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense. Music wasn’t supposed to be my path. But at the time, it was just so frustrating. I still had music in my veins, but it just wasn’t flowing.
Over the next couple of years, I slowly let it go. I never got rid of my instruments, and you can still hear me singing in the shop just about any day I’m in there. But that journey had to come to an end for another one to begin. By the time I left my job in 2011, I had at last made peace with packing away my musical dream. Whether I’d miss playing music or performing more, I wasn’t sure. But when I’d disappear into my garage alone, that’s when the true work began: figuring out who I was and what I was supposed to be doing.
I was meeting regularly with my mentor, Paul, back then, and one afternoon, he called me with an assignment. “I’m going to send you this link,” he told me. “It’s the actor Ed Burns talking about his fears. Watch it when you get home, Clint. Replay it many times and let it sink in.”