by Chip Gaines
It was a new challenge daily, but giving the advice sharpened my design skills, and I learned a few things about my own style in the process. It was an education for me. But more than that, it started to evolve into a second business.
Occasionally I’d point out that a room called for much more than new throw pillows, and the owner would ask, “Well, is that something you could do for me? I’d love to just hire you and Chip to come in and do the work!”
Between building the new house on our newly subdivided lot, continuing work on some small flip homes, and managing the rentals, Chip had more work than he could do himself, so he had put a crew of workmen together. “The Boys,” as we called them, were a talented bunch of hardworking guys who were just as adaptable as Chip seemed to be when it came to making my crazy ideas become reality. I truly could say, “Hey, why don’t we take that tree out of the front yard and hang it upside down in the master bedroom,” and they would do it, no questions asked. (All right, maybe there’d be a little head scratching. But then they’d shrug their shoulders and get to work.) So between all of us, we picked up this occasional additional work doing interiors—painting, refinishing floors, basically redecorating for these new clients.
It wasn’t easy to juggle it all, especially since I was running the store by myself that first year. But I loved every minute of it. There was no doubt in my mind that I was doing what I was meant to be doing.
I wonder sometimes if we know ourselves a lot better than we think we do when we’re children. We get into our teen years and college years, and so many of us let others redefine who we are, or we get lost along the way and have no idea what we really want to do with our lives. But once we finally figure it out, it often seems easy to look back into our childhoods and find a few clues that say, “Hey, maybe you were headed in that direction all along.”
For me, the entrepreneurial spirit was always there. During my young years in Wichita, Kansas, my mom worked at a little gift shop owned by one of her friends. After school my two sisters and I would go there while she worked, and I would always play store. I would sit there and pretend that I was working the cash register. I would have my sisters bring stuff up to the counter, and I would wrap it. I loved doing that. Even when we’d go home, I would set up my whole room like a store and then have fake customers come in. At one point I had a set of Lee Press-On Nails, and I would make my sisters come in like customers to a spa. I was always thinking about ways to make money, so I would basically make my sisters pay me for whatever they were buying, even if it was only a dime.
On the weekends I made a habit of setting up these makeshift little carnivals in our backyard and charging neighborhood kids a dollar to get in. I’d have lemonade and rides (primarily just the swing set) and games. To swing on the swing set would cost you another dime. But I always wanted it to be this fun experience for everyone, so I would work hard all week getting it set up.
My sisters basically provided free labor for me, in addition to having to pay to get in. I’m not sure why they went along with it, seeing that I was the middle child, but they did. Home was the place where I asserted myself, and I wasn’t shy about it the way I was in other places. I felt safe at home and felt like I could be me.
I was also a creative kid, but not in terms of artistry or design or anything like that. I was just always pretending. I kept trying to invent wings so I could fly. I always wanted to come up with something that someone would buy. So I was always thinking.
I remember playing a lot by myself. My older sister and my younger sister, when they weren’t being my minions, were usually out playing with the neighborhood kids, but I could usually be found in a corner playing make-believe. I pretended different things at different phases of my childhood. For a while I was always doing pretend commercials. So if I were eating breakfast, I would hold up the cereal box and say, “Kellogg’s. We make this nutritious.” I would read it like a newscaster and pretend that I was on a commercial. Sometimes I’d do the same thing with the bottle of shampoo in the shower. No matter where I was, I would act out these commercials as if I had a real audience.
That’s another strange thing, considering what I’m doing now. Growing up, I sometimes felt like this audience of mine was always with me, watching me in my pretend store, watching me doing commercials. It was almost as if I was living in the Truman Show, that movie with Jim Carrey in which a character is filmed from the moment of birth and watched by millions as he goes through his daily life. Even if I was by myself, I would look around and think, I know you are out there watching me.
My parents remember hearing me talking to this unseen audience often when I was a little girl. They say I also swore I had a pet rabbit named Jo. But according to my parents, it was just make-believe. It was all the expression of a creative mind.
Anyway, looking back, I can see there were a whole bunch of things in my childhood that pointed toward what I’d do in my adult life. And once I started doing it “for real,” I thrived. It seemed that the more opportunities I had to get creative and get entrepreneurial, the more fulfilled and energized I felt about life.
Outside of the store, Chip and I kept most of our endeavors in our typical wheelhouse. We sank our money and time into Third Street, where Chip continued to be the honorary “mayor” as he continued to expand his rental and home-building business.
A big part of Chip’s dream for that street began in a deal he made before we were married. Chip and his father went in on a deal together to purchase eleven acres of land just a few blocks from where we would live as newlyweds. Chip was convinced that the Third Street area would go up in value. Baylor University was only about a mile away, just across La Salle Avenue. And eventually, Chip believed, Baylor would run out of room to house its growing student population.
Well, his intuition on that was right. A big out-of-town company came along and saw what Chip was doing with his few small rental houses in this mostly untouched area of Waco, and they made him an offer—a good offer—on those eleven acres. Their plan was to build hundreds of units of dorm-style apartment homes on Third Street to market to the Baylor community. They were basically going to create a whole new neighborhood on the land Chip and his dad had been sitting on.
Chip wasn’t interested in selling all the land off. He had big dreams of owning rental homes up and down Third Street. So he structured a deal that sold off the back part of the acreage to that big company, while he kept the acreage along the road frontage to split into small lots where he could eventually build some individual rental houses himself.
Chip and his father made good money on that sale, and that allowed us to do some more investing, hire more help, and get started building some more little rental homes—basically sinking every penny that came into our long-term future. In our personal lives, we were still barely scraping by. But the business side of things was going well. In fact, we were seeing so much growth and progress on Third Street that there were times when we felt as if the whole neighborhood was ours.
Only it wasn’t.
By this time we had three dogs—Shiner, Maggie, and Blue, all rescue mutts. It was too crowded in an eight-hundred-square-foot house to keep three dogs inside all the time, so we’d let those dogs out to roam around. They were a lot like me and pretty much thought they owned Third Street too. I had this four-wheeler that I’d ride up and down the street, just checking on everything, and those dogs would run right along with me.
They were some of the best dogs you’ve ever seen. They never bothered anyone, certainly never bit anyone or even came close. But we had this one neighbor across the street who hated those dogs, and every single time she saw them off leash—which was just about all the time—she called animal control.
The people from the pound would show up, haul the dogs downtown in their van, and write us a ticket either in Jo’s name or my name. There were times when the officer would call the dogs right off of our front porch: “Come here, dogs!” They’d hop right in his van, and
off they’d go, back for another stay in the pound.
These weren’t like parking tickets either. They came with heavy fines, which I absolutely refused to pay out of some misguided form of principle. I never was much of a rule follower, and this “put your dog on a leash” rule was no exception. If the dogs had been hurting somebody, I’d have understood. But to take them from our own front yard?
Well, guess what? When you don’t pay your fines, eventually the police come looking for you.
We owed something like twenty-five-hundred dollars in tickets, and we simply didn’t have that kind of money lying around, even if we wanted to pay the fines. Especially since I was about to have a baby. Sure enough, two weeks early, I delivered a beautiful, healthy baby boy that we named Drake. We named him after the New York hotel where we’d stayed on our honeymoon.
So Drake was a week old, and I was sitting in this house, feeding him in the back room, when I heard a knock on the door. Chip answered it. It was the police.
“Is Joanna Gaines here? We have a warrant here for her arrest,” the officer said.
It was the tickets. I knew it. And I panicked. I picked up my son and I hid in the closet. I literally didn’t know what to do. I’d never even had a speeding ticket, and all of a sudden I’m thinking, I’m about to go to prison, and my child won’t be able to eat. What is this kid gonna do?
I heard Chip say, “She’s not here.”
Thankfully, Drake didn’t make a peep, and the officer believed him. He said, “Well, just let her know we’re looking for her,” and they left.
Jo’s the most conservative girl in the world. She had never even been late for school. I mean, this girl was straitlaced. So now we realize there’s a citywide warrant out for her arrest, and we’re like, “Oh, crap.” In her defense, Jo had wanted to pay those tickets off all along, and I was the one saying, “No way. I’m not paying these tickets.” So we decided to try to make it right. We called the judge, and the court clerk told us, “Okay, you have an appointment at three in the afternoon to discuss the tickets. See you then.” We wanted to ask the judge if he could remove a few of them for us. The fines for our dogs “running at large” on our front porch just seemed a bit excessive.
We arrived at the courthouse, and Chip was carrying Drake in his car seat. I couldn’t carry it because I was still recovering from Drake’s delivery. We got inside and spoke to a clerk. They looked at the circumstances and decided to switch all the tickets into Chip’s name.
Those dogs were basically mine, and it didn’t make sense to have the tickets in her name. But as soon as they did that, this police officer walked over and said, “Hey, do you mind emptying out all of your pockets?”
I got up and cooperated. “Absolutely. Yep,” I said. I figured it was just procedure before we went in to see the judge.
Then he said, “Yeah, you mind taking off your belt?”
I thought, That’s a little weird.
Then he said, “Do you mind turning around and putting your hands behind your back?”
They weren’t going to let us talk to the judge at all. The whole thing was just a sting to get us to come down there and be arrested. They arrested Chip on the spot. And I’m sitting there saying, “I can’t carry this baby in his car seat. What am I supposed to do?”
I started bawling. “You can’t take him!” I cried. But they did. They took him right outside and put him in the back of a police car.
Now I feel like the biggest loser in the world. I’m in the back of a police car as my crying wife comes out holding our week-old baby.
I’m walking out, limping, and waving to him as they drive away.
And I can’t even wave because my hands are cuffed behind my back. So here I am awkwardly trying to make a waving motion with my shoulder and squinching my face just to try to make Jo feel better.
It was just the most comical thing, honestly. A total joke. To take a man to jail because his dogs liked to walk around a neighborhood, half of which he owns? But it sure wasn’t funny at the time. I was flooded with hormones and just could not stop crying. They told me they were taking my husband to the county jail.
Luckily we had a buddy who was an attorney, so I called him. I was clueless. “I’ve never dated a guy that’s been in trouble, and now I’ve got a husband that’s in jail. What do I do? What’s the first step here?” I asked. He made some calls, and he told me that I could get Chip out with a bail bond for eight hundred dollars.
It couldn’t be done with a personal check, and we didn’t have eight hundred dollars in the bank anyway. I needed eight hundred dollars in cash to go buy a money order at the gas station near the facility in order to get Chip out of jail, and I didn’t have the money to do it. My parents or his parents would have given us that money in a heartbeat, I’m sure, but I was too embarrassed. I didn’t want our parents to know we didn’t have eight hundred dollars between us, and I certainly didn’t want them knowing Chip was in the slammer.
Thankfully, I had my shop. I went and I emptied out both the cash register and the safe in the back. I didn’t know how I’d make change the next day, and I had no idea how we’d make up for that loss when it came time to pay the bills. But I had no choice. It was the only money I had.
Off I went to the gas station. Then I went to the jail with my week-old son strapped to my chest in his BabyBjörn and waited. And waited. Chip had been in there for a few very long hours. I had all kinds of awful thoughts about what might have happened to him in there. What if he’d been roughed up? Strip-searched? Who knows what awful things could have happened in a place like that? I saw scary-looking characters come and go as I sat in that cold, concrete lobby, trying to make myself invisible.
Finally, out came Chip.
“Hi, baby. Thanks for bailing me out,” he said.
He sounded almost chipper.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah! You’ll never guess who I saw in there. Alfonzo! Remember the lawn guy who used to work for me? We had a good time catching up.”
Only Chip could go to prison and come out talking about all the friends he’d run into there.
I came out and I was like, “Whoa! That was awesome. Jo, I met this guy. He did this thing. You know this old guy that I used to tell you about—he and I used to work together? He’s doing great. Well, he’s in jail, but things are really good otherwise.”
Two of the policemen were also buddies of mine. These guys were literally standing on the other side of these bars going, “Why are you here? What’s the deal?” We had this endearing conversation right there, while I was in a jail cell.
I used to live out in the boonies when I was in college, and I had mowed this one guy’s grass. So I told him what I was in for. “Long story short, I got these dogs running around.” And he was like, “Oh, dude, you’ll be fine. I’m sure they’ll get you right out of here.”
It was just another day in my new life with Chip Gaines. But that was the moment I realized that we were right on the edge of a real financial struggle, and I didn’t like that feeling.
I have a naturally conservative nature, and Chip and I were supposed to balance each other out, not concede to each other’s strengths and weaknesses. My strength is saving and being tight with the money, but I had not exercised that strength recently. I had let my head get in the clouds and forgotten that this was important.
Not having the money to pay for those tickets in the first place should have been a wake-up call. Having to scrape the bottom of our barrel for bail money was certainly cause for alarm. I promised myself I would start putting money aside for future emergencies.
I don’t think it’s irrational or too conservative of me to think, I never want to carry my baby into the county jail ever again.
Is it?
SEVEN
ONE DOOR CLOSES
The very next week, I got back to work. I needed to get back in the shop and start making some sales to recoup the money we’d pulled out for bail and then to pay
off the rest of those tickets. I didn’t have a babysitter or the money to pay one. So I started working every day with a two-week-old baby.
We set up a little nursery area in the back office with a Pack ’n Play portable crib, and I worked the register with Drake in his BabyBjörn. I would run to the back office to feed him, and then, of course, a customer would walk in. So I’d have to wrap up the feeding session, which would make him cry.
I knew I needed to get some help at the shop. I couldn’t do all of this by myself anymore.
Thank God for Jessica! She was a good friend from college, one of the two sets of twins in our wedding. And best of all, she was available. I hired her on to assist behind the register, and that gave me a little bit of freedom. Jessica had a way about her that made every customer feel warm and welcome. I was thankful for her diligence and friendship during that time when I was both a new mom and a new business owner.
Just as Drake turned six weeks old, I decided I wanted to lose some baby weight. Chip and I were both still getting used to the idea that we had a baby of our own now, but I felt it was okay to leave him with Chip for a half hour or so in the mornings so I could take a short run up and down Third Street. I left Drake in the little swing he loved, kissed Chip good-bye, and off I went.
Chip was so sweet and supportive. When I got back he was standing in the doorway saying, “Way to go, baby!” He handed me a banana and asked if I’d had any cramps or anything. I hadn’t. I actually felt great.
I walked in and discovered Chip had prepared an elaborate breakfast for me, as if I’d run a marathon or something. I hadn’t done more than a half-mile walk-run, but he wanted to celebrate the idea that I was trying to get myself back together physically. He’d actually driven to the store and back and bought fresh fruit and real maple syrup and orange juice for me.