by Clint Harp
“Clint, what’s the longest table we’ve ever made together?” Joanna had just walked into my shop with this question. I thought for a moment. “Sixteen feet,” I told her. “For that house on the river last season.”
“Awesome,” she said. “Let’s make one longer.”
“Longer than sixteen feet?” I said.
“Yes, I’m thinking seventeen.”
“Done.”
The third season of Fixer Upper was under way, and Chip and Jo were hard at work on what would become one of viewers’ best-loved episodes, “The Barndominium,” about a horse barn turned condominium in the countryside suburb of Lacy Lakeview. It was now the summer of 2015, and we were practically old hands at this TV thing. After a certain crack house transformation in season 1, I worked on a variety of projects for the show, including a rickety hundred-year-old Craftsman that Chip nicknamed “Three Little Pigs,” a down-on-its-luck 1960s ranch house, and a so-called “Shingle Shack” near Lake Waco. I’d been called on to build everything from farm and craft tables to fireplace mantels, cubbyhole hallway units, and barstools. I had not a spare moment—and plenty of great memories.
Like during the second season, when Chip and Jo gave a “modern coastal” look to a house called the “Faceless Bunker.” For the table Jo asked me to build, she wanted me to tie in wood and metal and then make benches in the waterfall style—which essentially means that the bench top looks like one very long piece of wood that has been bent at both ends at a perfect right angle so the grain is continuous throughout the whole piece. Previously, I’d mixed gas pipe with wood in making tables and shelving units. But as far as a giant table base welded together and grinded down smooth and finished with a satin black finish, which was what Jo was requesting? I’d never tried that, nor had I attempted a waterfall edge. But of course, I agreed to take it all on.
The guys and I came up with a plan for the waterfall benches: we’d create a perfectly flat core using three-quarter-inch maple plywood and then wrap that in the actual wood we made the table from, which was antique pine. This allowed us to create a three-inch-thick board. About 18 inches from both ends we made a perfect miter cut and then rejoined that cutoff to the piece we’d just sawed it from at a right angle. Voilà—waterfall edge. For the base that would compliment our massive wooden top, we stepped out into a bit of the unknown. Fortunately, I had Jacob on my team. Our skinny wunderkind from Houston was curious about almost everything, and that curiosity had once led him to a welding machine back in high school. We had a metal guy down the street provide us with some square metal posts, I bought Jacob some cheap metal-cutting tools, and he brought his welder to the shop. He got right to work and knocked it out of the park. When it was done, it was a thing of beauty. He ground his welds and painted it a satin black. I’m so proud of that piece because it just shows what you can do when you work with people and put your heads together and get creative and use everything you have.
Another one of my season 2 faves? The so-called “Tire Swing House” makeover for the Gulley family. In that episode, Jo asked me to take some old flooring ripped out of the back of some eighteen-wheelers and transform it into an island top. I went over and shot the scene with Jo. I pulled up and found J. D. Scott, older brother to Jonathan and Drew Scott of Property Brothers. Even as early as the second season, it was apparent this thing was turning into something more than just a little show about some house flippers in Waco.
As soon as I walked in, Jo and I started filming the design scene. We talked for a while as we walked around the place, and I found some eight-foot sections of laminated-edge grain maple flooring resting on the floor. You had to manhandle one just to move it two feet over! Gluing all these together to make one giant seven-foot-square island top was not only going to be a bear, but it was also going to create a piece that would weigh as much as a small car. My mind was racing with the logistics. The cameras needed to reset, so we took a quick break. Steve, the producer and by now also my friend, pulled me aside and said, “Hey, take this rag and this bottle of water and say, ‘Hey, Jo! Take a look at this . . . it’s like magic.’ And then wipe the wet rag over the dirty lumber and show her how pretty it’s going to be when you finish it!” It was genius. And also completely obvious, or at least it should have been. And in a normal situation without a camera in my face and that red light shining, maybe I would’ve thought to do that. But with everything swirling around, I was literally just caught up with the details of making such a large piece. But that’s why the producers are there, and Steve and his wife, Lauren, were both great at that. Making TV really is a team effort.
Chip and Jo hadn’t just connected with viewers as they wowed the world with their renovations. They’d also helped turn our sleepy little town into a hot destination. With the cameras rolling, they began the conversion of a massive grain barn in the heart of downtown Waco into Magnolia Market at the Silos, an enormous store, bakery, and garden that sits on two and a half acres and features all things Magnolia. Business boomed. Tourists from all over the country were descending in droves. Viewers had embraced Jo’s warm smile and “shiplap” lexicon, Chip’s humor and antics, and the couple’s on-the-farm life with their “kiddos.” They were a real, relatable, all-American family. Throw in Jo’s undeniable skill for incredible design, and you can see why the ratings were through the roof. Viewers loved the show, and it seemed they couldn’t get enough. It was an exciting time.
But for all its entertainment, what made the show so special, in my humble opinion, was its authenticity. The show is a genuine reflection of Chip and Jo’s lives off-camera, and ours too. Jo really is a self-taught interior and exterior designer who sold home goods for years before a producer ran across a blog post about her and she hit it big. Chip really was buying real estate around Waco, fixing it up, and flipping it with Jo. And Kelly and I really did travel a winding yellow brick road—from a basement kitchen in Paris to a cement-cracked garage in Dallas, through three kids and multiple maxed-out credit cards—to launch Harp Design Co. around our kitchen table. None of that is made up, and I’ve always loved the fact that the show is so organic. For over a decade, we’d all been scratching, clawing, wandering, and hoping to create the life we’d always imagined we could have.
And now there we were.
Not long after Jo asked me to build the Barndominium’s seventeen-foot-long table, I’d hit the carpenter’s jackpot. Just down the street from my shop, an older man who’d crafted furniture for over fifty years was moving on. He and a crew had built cabinets and tables and even eight feet of a spiral staircase that was never finished, back in the seventies. When I walked into the man’s shop for a visit, the staircase was still there, as if someone had just moments earlier set it aside to work on something else. I was there because I’d heard the power company was planning to buy out his business and others around it so they could run power lines through the area.
“Hi, I’m Clint,” I said. “I’ve got a woodshop up the street. I heard you were selling a bunch of your tools and whatnot.”
“Yes, sir, that’s the story,” he told me. “I don’t do too much building anymore, so I’m just selling everything off. Take a look around and let me know what you like!”
Tools were scattered all over the place. Much of the good stuff had already been claimed. Just as I started to think this had been a wasted trip, I looked up. Above me were a couple dozen wooden trusses that spanned the width of the shop. All of it had been nicely preserved. My heartbeat sped up.
“Um, excuse me, sir,” I said. “This may sound crazy, but what about the roof?”
“The roof?” he said, raising his brows.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’m wondering what you’re going to do with the roof. Is this place going to get torn down?”
“I believe so,” he said. “That’s the plan. But . . . you want the roof?”
“Well, yeah, if you don’t mind,” I told him. “I’d love it. If I bring a crew in here to tear this thing down, w
ould you be okay with that?”
“I don’t see why not,” he said. “Let me clear my stuff out of here and then you can have it. Just be careful!”
When Jo and the Fixer Upper crew asked me to build that seventeen-footer, I of course was so quick to say yes, even though I didn’t have the foggiest idea where the wood for it would come from. But by this point I was finally catching onto the reality that if I really needed it, the wood would be there. And there it was in the form of an old carpenter’s roof, just waiting for me to come along. Plentiful and right on time.
By the end of filming, Chip and Jo had pulled off their usual miracle. The result was a contemporary two-story with Old World charm, complete with a LEGO wall, a children’s play space, and beautiful hardwood floors. I completed the enormous table, and it was so long that I had to borrow a trailer just to haul it over to the house. When the episode aired a few months later, there sat my art piece, crafted entirely from reclaimed pine, gracing the Barndominium’s stately dining hall on the first floor. Up to eighteen people could be seated around that grand seventeen-footer, courtesy of an old carpenter who provided the wood and a younger carpenter who, only three years earlier, had built his very first farm table.
By the time I created the table for the Barndominium episode, it had really started to hit us just how different things were going to be for us. Our family went on vacation to the beach with our best friends, Jen and Patrick. It had been our annual tradition. On our way to the beach that year, with the Fixer Upper phenomenon well under way, we stopped at a restaurant for lunch. Without blinking an eye, a lady walked right up to our table and said, “Oh my gosh, you’re Clint, the carpenter from Fixer Upper! I love that show and I just feel like I know you!” And as our presence on social media grew, we started to see ourselves getting tagged by people who had happened to see us somewhere and just snapped a pic. It was pretty clear from that point on that things were changing. Our lives. The city of Waco itself. My family’s sense of normalcy. It was both an exhilaration and an adjustment, all at once.
* * *
In all but the first season of Fixer Upper, I appeared in over half the episodes. Each time I was on the show, I’d spend around an hour filming the design scene with Jo, and maybe another half hour to an hour when I delivered the item to the house. Meanwhile, Chip and Jo and the crew would be sprinting to keep up with an impossible filming schedule. Not everything always went true to plan. Several times, the polyurethane on a table was still wet as we delivered it to Jo on camera. And on one occasion, Jo wasn’t exactly thrilled with the look of a table base I’d finished with blue milk paint at the request of one of her design assistants, and she had one of her guys repaint the base in white. I’ll never forget walking in with the table in my hands and the cameras rolling and immediately knowing she didn’t like it. I still to this day wish I had said in the scene, “You hate it, don’t you?” Instead I just rolled with it and waited till the cameras turned off to ask her thoughts. I was right, and it would’ve made great TV. But all in all, the Fixer Upper experiment had gotten off to an insanely good start. We’d put our whole hearts into every project, and it seemed to be working out.
During the second season, I had turned some candlesticks with a white distressed finish, and even gave Jo, on camera, a crash course in turning. Those bad boys became an overnight sensation. The next thing I knew, I was underneath a pile of orders for two thousand candlesticks, which we sold through our online shop (apologies to all those we frustrated with our tardiness as I tried to keep up with the sudden demand). Thankfully, we had some more staff by then. In 2014, as Harp Design Co. had become more visible, I’d expanded my team: Jacob and Marco joined Britt and me in the shop. At the end of that year, Kelly and I were euphoric because our company had at last generated real revenue. We’d brought in just north of $40,000. Though we were at last making a little money, I honestly still don’t know how we were managing to pay three employees, feed a family of five, and keep our lights on. Yet somehow, we did.
The show had given us an awesome platform, but the real work of building our business happened offscreen. With cameos in multiple episodes, Harp Design Co. continued to grow and we found ourselves adjusting to instant exposure. As we grew, the projects I’d do for Jo and the show would become a smaller percentage of our overall business, which had to happen if we were to survive. We had to stand on our own two feet. From cutting boards and candlesticks to farm tables and benches—HDC was custom-crafting hundreds of pieces in a year. On top of that, Kelly and I were juggling the needs of three kids and finishing the renovation of our home, which, following the on-air overhaul, took another two years to complete.
As the company grew, Kelly and I finally revisited the dream of turning the shop’s carport into a storefront where tourists and locals alike could purchase our handmade furniture, as well as Kelly’s designs and curated home goods. The guys and I worked to transform the open-sided carport into an attractive enclosed space. But when it came to actually getting the store up and going, it was my wife who picked up the ball and ran with it. When she was done, she’d created a masterpiece. I couldn’t wait to invite our first customers over. The dream was real.
Next, we built a pole barn for wood storage, and a finishing shed—which, if at all possible, needs to be a separate space so that sawdust doesn’t get into the varnish. We also bought and renovated a warehouse space, and carved out an office for the people who’d eventually join our team. That crew, as of this writing, is twenty-five strong. Our incomparable staff would grow from Britt, Jacob, and Marco to include Demi, Kristin, Andrew, and John, along with many others who would help us make this thing happen. And of course my mother-in-law, Debbie, who lived down the street from us and did just about any and everything, plus some. Many nights she’d be up late in that cold, damp warehouse, packing boxes to ship out the next morning. She also worked in the storefront, which we opened to customers in 2014. She quietly did more for us than we could ever repay.
As thrilling as it was to be part of the Fixer Upper phenomenon, the dream for Kelly and me had always been exactly what we found ourselves doing when the cameras weren’t rolling: building a homegrown business from the floorboards up with the help of an unbelievably great team; daring to wander off the beaten path and blaze a trail of our own; and working with my hands the way my granddad had taught me at the Roost. That dream was finally becoming real.
Then in the midst of our excitement about the strides we were making came a sobering reminder of life’s fragility. Brooke, my uncle Howard’s daughter—the fun-loving, no-nonsense cousin I’d shared so many good times with at the Roost, and who had supported and celebrated me through every twist and turn of our Fixer Upper journey—was in a tragic accident. Driving to work one morning, she was hit by a motorist who’d suffered a heart attack, lost control of the steering wheel, and swerved across the median into my cousin’s lane. In an instant, she was gone. With my heart in shreds, I made the same cross-country trek to Alabama to attend her memorial service at the same funeral home where her father had been laid to rest. Even with all the filming and fun stuff we were doing, losing Brooke made it all feel a little less exciting. She was one of my biggest cheerleaders, and once she was gone, it took me a while to find joy in it all once again.
* * *
Lindsey, an HGTV exec who essentially managed Fixer Upper and developed other new shows decided one day to reach out to me. I’d heard of her before and had gotten to know her through social media, and I liked her vibe: hilarious, hardworking, creative. I was in the parking lot between our house and the shop when she called.
“Clint, I’d like to produce some online content with you, maybe some two- or three-minute videos documenting the process of you building something for Jo and the show. Would you be up for it?”
“No-brainer, Lindsey,” I told her. “Just tell me what to do.”
“Great!” she said. And then right before she hung up came this stunner: “Just be awesome and d
on’t suck. You never know, it might turn into your own show one day.”
I ran into the house and told Kelly. We couldn’t believe it. Who knew, when I was sweating it out in my makeshift garage sweat lodge years before, that we’d end up here? We were pumped. From day one, we’d been delivering tables to Joanna and the network based on a smile, a nod, and a handshake, but now maybe an actual contract was in our future.
When some of our friends and Fixer Upper crewmates heard about my new opportunity, they were like, “Nice work, Ty Pennington!” Being compared to the famous carpenter from Trading Spaces and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition? Yeah, right. Give me a break. But there was no doubt I hoped there might be a smidgen of truth to their predictions. You don’t bust your tail to launch a home design company and then pray it languishes in obscurity. This was potentially huge, and I intended to make the most of it. Besides that, back in our early days of marriage when Kelly and I would watch every episode of Trading Spaces, Ty had been my favorite.
But things tend to take a while in TV land, and this project was no exception. The year rolled on and my team and I knocked out more projects for Fixer Upper. Finally, several months later, we began shooting our webisodes. I had a crew of one: a local freelance camera guy and an all-around creative dude, Zack. On the first day of filming, he showed up at the shop with the camera the production company had sent to him. That was it.