The Magnolia Story (with Bonus Content)

by Chip Gaines

  People wound up giving us deals like that almost everywhere we went on that trip. It was incredible. And thank goodness, because we were already low on funds.

  From there, we decided to continue up into New England, meandering across the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, cutting through the country roads of southern New Hampshire, and heading north to explore as much of the crashing Atlantic on the rocky Maine coast as we could. We stayed off the interstates and took back roads as much as possible, stopping at antiques stores and mom-and-pop shops and cute old barns and farmhouses—whatever caught our eye. One night we stayed in the dreamiest bed-and-breakfast right on a farm, where we ate fresh eggs and a home-cooked meal in the morning. Both of us agreed, “What could be better than that?”

  Before I met Chip, I was basically a city girl—or maybe a suburban girl. As a kid I lived in a typical cookie-cutter neighborhood in Wichita, Kansas. We lived there until I was twelve, while my dad kind of worked his way up the corporate ladder for Firestone. But as a small child I would often go visit my friend’s farm. She had silos that we would play in—I thought that was the coolest thing.

  My friend hated living out on that farm. She wanted to come play at my house so she could be in a neighborhood, riding bikes with all my friends. But I liked going to her house because it was a farm. We would pretend we were these farm girls that wore aprons, and we’d come up with stories like, “Let’s pretend that Bobby got stuck in the silo.” We played so much make-believe at that farm that I feel as though farm living was a part of my past, even though it really wasn’t. Driving through the beautiful farmlands along the back roads of New York brought back the memories of my time spent there.

  The grass is always greener, right? We were both brought up in these sort of cookie-cutter neighborhoods, but in my case, I loved going to my granddad’s ranch. That was definitely where I got the cowboy in my personality. My granddad J. B. was a bona fide cowboy. He was like the Marlboro man, literally—smoked cigarettes, tall, lean, great-looking dude, always had this gorgeous cowboy hat on, wore long-sleeved shirts and long pants every day of his life, even when it was a hundred degrees outside. He was just one of these iconic characters. I still to this day think of him as the hero of all heroes, the legend of all legends.

  I don’t mean to overstate that, because my dad was a huge hero to me too. He was the one who was there, who loved us, who was at every ball game, and my granddad wasn’t the doting, overtly loving kind of guy. But he was kind of the patriarch of the family, and spending time with him on that ranch made a big impact on my life.

  I may have grown up in the suburbs, like most kids did, but I’ve always felt like J. B. and I had a lot in common. And I’ve always felt like I was born a hundred years too late.

  For either of us to romanticize farm life was probably a silly thing to do. It’s a lot of work. For my friend, living on a farm just meant she had a whole lot of chores to do. But no matter how much I heard her complain, I still thought, That’s what I want someday. So having that little taste of farm life on our honeymoon sure felt right to both of us.

  Days later, somewhere along the woodsy coast of Maine, at around eleven o’clock at night, we had another memorable moment. We were tooling around a corner when Chip slammed on the brakes, squealing to a dead stop. He and I both stared out through the windshield and said, “What in the world is that?!”

  Luckily we weren’t in a hurry and weren’t driving too fast, because right in front of us was this big, awkward-looking moose standing right in the middle of the road. Neither one of us had ever seen one in person, and we just could not believe how big this thing was. It was like a dream come true for me to come across an animal like that in the wild.

  Once I realized what it was, I was like, “What should we do? I feel like we should do something!” But Jo said, “Let the poor thing go,” so I did. We watched that majestic beast wander off into the woods and disappear in the darkness just as fast as he’d shown up in our headlights.

  I feel like the moose was our final big find of that trip. We were both tired, and after seeing something that magnificent, we decided it was time to head home. We took a different route down through Boston and realized as we drove through the city that we were basically out of money. We had nothing left. We stayed on the interstates after that and made it back to New York with as few stops as possible, arriving just in time to fly back home.

  Jo’s idea of being “broke” was when she had, like, $1,000 left in the bank. But “broke” for me meant actually broke. I wasn’t much for bank accounts or credit cards back then. So once we got back to Waco, we literally had no money left for a hotel room or anything. We had no choice but to go straight to the vacated rental house we were planning to move into.

  The students had just moved out of it while we were on our honeymoon, and it was nighttime when we got back home, so we didn’t have a chance to get in and inspect it or clean the place or anything like that. We just drove in from the airport and pulled up in front of that little yellow house on Third Street, at the end of this dreamy honeymoon of a lifetime—

  And Chip carried me over the threshold. Right into a nightmare.

  FOUR

  THE HONEYMOON’S OVER

  The rental houses on Third Street that Chip owned when we got married were really small, and not the most attractive homes. I wouldn’t have chosen to live in any one of them if I could avoid it. Thankfully, though, the nicest one of the bunch happened to open up at the end of the spring semester, and Chip hadn’t put any summer renters into it yet. It was a yellow ranch-style with a nice white porch on the front and a pair of huge magnolia trees in the yard, and it was bigger than the rest—maybe twelve hundred square feet or so. It was just pretty enough that I was excited to live there and fix it up—to make it feel like our very own home.

  Chip and I were both exhausted when we finally pulled up in front of that house, but we were still riding the glow of our honeymoon, and I was so excited as he carried me over the threshold—until the smell nearly knocked us over.

  “Oh my word,” I said, pinching my nose and trying to hold my breath so I wouldn’t gag. “What is that?”

  Chip flicked the light switch, and the light didn’t come on. He flicked it up and down a few times, then felt his way forward in the darkness and tried another switch.

  “The electricity’s off,” he said. “The girls must’ve had it shut off when they moved out.”

  “Didn’t you transfer it back into your name?” I asked.

  “I guess not. I’m sorry, babe,” Chip said.

  “Chip, what is that smell?”

  It was the middle of June in Waco, Texas. The temperature had been up over a hundred degrees for days on end, and the humidity was stifling, amplifying whatever that rotten smell was coming from the kitchen. Chip always carries a knife and a flashlight, and it sure came in handy that night. Chip made his way back there and found that the fridge still had a bunch of food left in it, including a bunch of ground beef that had just sat there rotting since whenever the electricity went out.

  The food was literally just smoldering in this hundred-degree house. So we went from living in a swanky hotel room on Park Avenue in New York City to this disgusting, humid stink of a place that felt more like the site of a crime scene than a home at this point. Honestly, I hadn’t thought it through very well. But it was late, and we were tired, and I just focused on making the most of this awful situation.

  So we opened some windows and brought our bags in, and I told Jo we’d just tough it out and sleep on the floor and clean it all up in the morning. That’s when she started crying.

  I lay down on the floor thinking, Is this what my life is going to look like now that I married Chip? Is this my new normal?

  That’s when another smell hit me. It was in the carpet.

  “Chip, did those girls have a dog here?” I asked.

  “They had a couple of dogs,” he answered. “Why?”

  You could s
mell it. In the carpet. It was nasty. I was just lying there with my head next to some old dog urine stain that had been heated by the Texas summer heat.

  It was like microwaved dog pee.

  It was. It was awful. It was three in the morning. And I finally said, “Chip, I’m not sleeping in this house.”

  We were broke. We couldn’t go to a hotel. There was no way we were gonna go knock on one of our parents’ doors at that time of night.

  That’s when I got an idea. We happened to have Chip’s parents’ old RV parked in a vacant lot a few blocks down. We had some of our things in there and had been using it basically as a storage unit until we moved in. “Let’s get in the RV. We’ll go find somewhere to plug it in, and we’ll have AC,” I said.

  As we stepped outside, the skies opened up. It started pouring rain. When we finally got into the RV, soaking wet, we pulled down the road a ways and Chip said, “I know where we can go.” It was raining so hard we could barely see through the windshield, and all of a sudden Chip turned the RV into a cemetery.

  “Why are you pulling in to a cemetery?” I asked him.

  “We’re not going to the cemetery,” Chip said. “It’s just next to a cemetery. There’s an RV park back here.”

  “Are you kidding me? Could this get any worse?”

  “Oh, quit it. You’re going to love it once I get this AC fired up.”

  Chip decided to go flying through the median between two rows of RV parking, not realizing it was set up like a culvert for drainage and rain runoff. That RV bounced so hard that, had it not been for our seat belts, we would’ve both been catapulted through the roof of that vehicle.

  “What was that?!”

  “I don’t know,” Chip said.

  I tried to put it in reverse, and then forward, and then reverse again, and the thing just wouldn’t move. I hopped out to take a look and couldn’t believe it. There was a movie a few years ago where the main character gets his RV caught on this fulcrum and it’s sitting there teetering with both sets of wheels up in the air. Well, we sort of did the opposite. We went across this valley, and because the RV was so long, the butt end of it got stuck on the little hill behind us, and the front end got stuck on the little hill in front of us, and the wheels were just sort of hanging there in between. I crawled back into the RV soaking wet and gave Jo the bad news.

  We had no place to go, no place to plug in so we could run the AC; it was pouring rain so we couldn’t really walk anywhere to get help. And at that point I was just done. We wound up toughing it out and spending the first night after our honeymoon in a hot, old RV packed full of our belongings, suspended between two bumps in the road.

  The next morning, someone from the RV park spotted us and was kind enough to call a tow truck. The first truck they sent wasn’t big enough, so they had to call in a semi tow truck. One of the big ones. We were freaking out, of course, ’cause we were flat broke. (Are you starting to pick up on a theme here? We stayed flat broke a lot of the time early on.) We didn’t know how we were going to pay this guy. But then our very last little honeymooner’s miracle came through. That truck driver said, “Well, guys, it looks like the honeymoon is over. This one’s on us.”

  This was just the way things were with Chip. He was always going out on a limb, but God always had a way of looking out for him. Actually, God seemed to always be out on that limb with him, taking care of him. We should have been more careful not to spend every last dollar on our honeymoon. But that favor from that sweet man made us feel as if maybe some things were just meant to be.

  By the light of day, we went back to the yellow house full of hot stink, and I made up my mind right then and there to make the best of it. I pulled myself together and rolled up my sleeves (as people say), and I said to Chip, “Okay. Let’s do this.”

  What else could I do? This was our home now. We didn’t have any other options. I covered my nose and mouth and started cleaning. Once the two of us got the worst of it out, Chip went off and took care of some business. There were rent checks in from his other houses that needed to be cashed, and as soon as we had a few dollars in hand, we hit the hardware store.

  I had never done anything design-related at that point, but there was something very liberating about starting from scratch. We knew every room needed to be painted, all the carpet needed to come out, and all the hardwood floors needed to be refinished. And Chip gave me free rein to make that home whatever I wanted to make it.

  To be honest, I didn’t know what I wanted to make it, so I started with one basic idea: “I have, like, six favorite colors, so I’m going to paint every room one of those colors.”

  Once I got going, I decided that using different colors in every room wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to make every room a different theme. I went with a nautical theme in the front room and decorated with a bunch of cheap sailboats and netting that I bought at a hobby store. The kitchen was French-inspired, so it was mustard yellow. Our bedroom was hotel-inspired—all white. The back room was Chip-inspired, so it was cedar and horns and cowhides. Every room was completely different.

  We did every part of this renovation together with our bare hands. Chip restored all of the wood floors, all the tile work—everything. I was learning as we went, but I definitely did my part.

  That house was gorgeous. Jo did an awesome job helping fix it up, and her ideas were great. There was a moment in the kitchen when I smarted off, though. I don’t even remember what I said, to be honest, but Jo got real mad and started yelling. She was carrying this five-gallon bucket of primer. She slammed it down on the ground to make a point, and it splashed right back up in her face. It was dripping off her eyelashes and her nose.

  Whenever something like that happened in my family, we’d all just laugh, you know? So I laughed, even though she was mad at me, and that made her even angrier. She started yelling again with the primer dripping all over, and I just had this moment where I looked at her and everything seemed to be going in slow motion and I thought, I love this woman. She is tough! Oh, this is gonna work.

  That was our first real “fight,” and even now we both agree it was our biggest. Chip had smarted off about something, so my blood was already boiling, but when I slammed that bucket down, Chip says I became a ninja—the kind you don’t want to mess with. Yet he still laughed, against his better judgment. We joke about it now, like, “Well, I’m mad, but I’m not primer-in-the-face mad.”

  It would take us a few months to get everything in livable condition in that house, even though we were living there full-time. Looking back, I don’t know how we did it, but I guess you have a lot more time and energy before there are kids in the picture. We were newlyweds. We had our whole lives ahead of us. And despite the rough start, we were still riding the excitement of our honeymoon and feeding off of that energy we seemed to have whenever we were together, which was basically all the time.

  Chip never said no to any of my ideas. He was 100 percent on board for my various theme rooms. He spoiled me in that way. But it was more than that. Chip supported everything I wanted to do. He even supported my dreams. The two of us would dream together all the time, just lying in bed at night, imagining where we could go in life, talking about things we always wanted to do or see or accomplish.

  Until I left home and went to do my internship in New York City, I honestly didn’t know what I wanted to do. At some point in my teen years, I told my father that I wanted to take over his Firestone shop when he retired. I thought that was the right thing to do. I thought it would make him proud, as if I were the son he’d never had who would step into his shoes and carry on the successful business he’d created.

  Then I went to Baylor and got interested in broadcast journalism. I loved the storytelling and the editing process, and I managed to get two years’ worth of internships under my belt at our local CBS station, KWTX. Everyone said that if you wanted to make it in TV news you had to go to New York City to do it, so I went out on a limb and applied to the Today sh
ow, Good Morning America, and 48 Hours. Those shows didn’t have internship affiliations with Baylor at the time, so it was a long shot to say the least. I just went and did it on my own out of blind, naive ambition, I guess.

  I had lived a pretty sheltered life up until then, so when 48 Hours selected me, I was worried my parents might fight it. How could they let their little girl go to the big city by herself? But I was wrong. My protective parents not only supported my ambition, they paid for my apartment for those six months—a good thing, too, because it was fifteen hundred dollars a month for a room in a shared apartment with two other people!

  As amazing as it was to live on West 57th Street and to work under a man as esteemed as Dan Rather, I quickly fell out of love with the news business while working that job. My job as an intern was to read the papers to find salacious stories, cold cases, or horrible crime stories to pitch to the senior editors. It was heavy.

  While I fell out of love with TV news, I did fall in love with New York City. It was more than just wandering in and out of those lovely boutiques that I mentioned before. I was pretty homesick during those six months, and I especially missed my mother. So it was eye-opening and beautiful to see so many people in that big city who looked like my mom and me. It seemed that everywhere I looked there was a woman walking down the street who reminded me of her. It was so unlike growing up in Kansas and Texas. New York is where I finally began to appreciate all of the different cultures and truly began to fall in love with my Korean heritage.

  It’s difficult to put into words, but there was something about that experience that helped me find myself. I would go home every night and write about my experiences—what I’d seen, what I’d done, and sometimes just about whatever I was thinking or feeling. And as I did that, something shifted in me. I started owning who I am, realizing that I was unique and that God had a unique purpose for me. I’d spent my whole life worrying about what people thought about me or whether I was good enough or thinking about what I should be doing instead of really digging down to find out what I wanted to do.