The Magnolia Story (with Bonus Content)

by Chip Gaines

  I sat down to eat, and I looked over at Drake. He was sound asleep in his swing, still wearing nothing but his diaper. “Chip, did you take Drake to the grocery store without any clothes on?”

  Chip gave me a real funny look. He said, “What?”

  I gave him a funny look back.

  “Oh my gosh,” he said. “I totally forgot Drake was here. He was so quiet.”

  “Chip!” I yelled, totally freaked out.

  I was a first-time mom. Can you imagine?

  Anyone who’s met Chip knows he can get a little sidetracked, but this was our child!

  He was in that dang swing that just made him perfectly silent. I felt terrible. It had only been for a few minutes. The store was just down the street. But I literally got on my knees to beg for Jo’s forgiveness.

  Several days later I decided to go on a good long jog, trusting that Chip would not leave Drake again. As I was on my way back I saw Chip coming down the road in his truck with the trailer on it. He rolled up to me with his window down and said, “Baby, you’re doing so good. I’m heading to work now. I’ve got to go.”

  I looked in the back, thinking, Of course, he’s got Drake. But I didn’t see a car seat.

  “Chip, where’s Drake?” she said, and I was like, “Oh, shoot!” She took off without a word and ran like lightning all the way back to the house as I turned the truck around. She got there faster on foot than I did in my truck.

  I sure hope no one from Child Protective Services reads this book. They can’t come after me retroactively, can they?

  Chip promised it would never happen again. So the third time I attempted to take a run, I went running down Third Street and made it all the way home. I walked in, and Chip and Drake were gone. I thought, Oh, good. Finally he remembered to take the baby. But then I noticed his car was still parked out front. I looked around and couldn’t find them anywhere.

  Moments later, Chip pulled up on his four-wheeler—with Drake bungee-strapped to the handlebars in his car seat. “Chip!” I screamed, “What in the heck are you doing?”

  “Oh, he was crying, and I’d always heard my mom say she would drive me around the neighborhood when I was a baby, and it made me feel better,” Chip said. “He loved it. He fell right to sleep.”

  “He didn’t love it, Chip. He probably fell asleep because the wind in his face made it impossible to breathe.”

  I didn’t go for another run for the whole first year of Drake’s life, and I took him to the shop with me every single day. Some people might see that as a burden, but I have to admit I loved it. Having him in that BabyBjörn was the best feeling in the world.

  Drake was a shop baby. He would come home every night smelling like candles.

  We had friends who owned a barbecue joint, and their baby always came home smelling like a rack of ribs. I liked Drake’s smell a whole lot better.

  A lot of my clientele seemed to have kids who were older, and I swear every single one of those moms would smile and coo over Drake, saying, “Joanna, this goes by so fast. You need to embrace these moments. My kids are getting ready to go off to college, and it feels like just yesterday they were little like this.” And as much as they loved shopping at my store, some of my best customers kept saying, “You should think about taking some time off—maybe close up shop for a while. This is a moment in time you’ll never get back. Don’t work too much. Make sure you’re all-in with your baby.”

  I didn’t listen at first. What new mom does? It seems as if every day lasts forever when you’re up all night with feedings and changing smelly diapers. But the more I heard those words, the more they started to sink in.

  Toward the end of 2005, Chip came across an opportunity to buy a nice lot just up the road from where we lived. He knew how cramped we were in that little white house, and even though he felt as though any money we made should be reinvested in the business and rolled into the next project, he asked me one day if maybe we should invest in building a house of our own.

  “Yes!” I said. I loved that idea.

  Chip was pretty certain he could get the financing together for the house if we bought the land, but the parcel of land was $5,000, and he wasn’t sure how we were going to get it before somebody else snatched it up.

  That’s when I surprised him. Ever since the jail incident, I had been saving a little money here and there from my sales at the shop. I just set it away where neither of us would touch it until there was something important to use it on, just for us.

  The amount of money I had saved was exactly $5,000—just what we needed to buy that land. So we went for it, and together we designed a comfortable, sixteen-hundred-square-foot home from the ground up. I loved designing this home from the beginning stages.

  I learned that, unlike the older homes we had renovated, a new home doesn’t come with oak floors, thick trim, and built-in character. And I learned pretty quickly that adding character was expensive. If I wanted our place to be special and unique, I had to get creative. On the exterior, for instance, we wanted rock, but could only afford enough for the front of the house. So we added larger trees in the landscape to hide the side elevation and draw attention to the front door.

  Speaking of that front door, Chip had to get creative himself. Buying things for clients was one thing, but buying stuff for our house was a different story. We had this charming arched door, crafted out of solid mesquite wood, that Chip had bought from a guy whose shop was going out of business. The best thing about this door was it had a peep door at the top that you could open so you could see who was on the other side. It felt very Hansel and Gretel. This amazing door brought the perfect balance to the heavy rock exterior—made it feel like a quaint rustic cottage.

  On the inside, we couldn’t afford the oak wood floors I loved, so we opted for stained concrete. I didn’t want the room to look too cold, so we ended up scoring the concrete in a large diagonal pattern that made the floors look like a million bucks. We had some exterior rock left over, so I decided to mount the remaining pieces as a chair rail under our bar top, which Chip had constructed from reclaimed wood. Eventually it all came together, and we thought it was beautiful. It was so rewarding to stay on budget but have a house that was unique in its own special way.

  In 2006 we moved in, and the layout worked so well that we decided our house would make the perfect model for a new set of student rental homes. We figured we could fit eight of those houses along the frontage parcels Chip had retained after selling part of the eleven acres to that big, out-of-town development company. But building those houses would mean getting a bigger line of credit and expanding Chip’s ragtag home-building and house-flipping business into more of a bona fide company.

  This house-building business quickly became more than Chip’s company. It became our company, a true fusion of what he was doing and what I was doing. We decided to call it Magnolia Homes.

  It was right around that time when I found out I was pregnant with our second child. This time it was going be a girl. We decided to name her Ella Rose.

  Sales at my shop were better in my second year than they’d been in the first. I was building a reputation and a steady client base, and I felt like I was starting to actually know what I was talking about in terms of design.

  I loved that shop. I loved being there every day. Yet once I was pregnant with Ella, I heard a voice. Remember the voice on our first date, the one that told me Chip was the man I would marry? This was the same voice. But this time it was saying, Jo, it’s time to stay home with your babies.

  I didn’t really want to hear that. In fact, I argued with the voice, just as I had argued about what it said about Chip. “No, I can’t,” I said. “I’m finally getting this! It’s working!”

  And it was working, better than I ever expected. That shop meant something to a lot of people, and I’m not just talking about me and my clientele.

  It seemed that wherever we went and whatever we did, Chip would always find some kids to mentor along the way.
One late night we were at the shop unboxing some candles that had just come in, and Chip noticed two young boys walking through our parking lot. They were all of ten years old.

  “Hey, guys,” he said. “It’s late! What are you guys doing out here on the streets at this time of night?”

  They said they lived in the neighborhood behind the shop, and they always walked around at night. So Chip said, “Hey, you want to make a little bit of money?”

  Of course the boys said yes. He invited them to come help us with inventory and gave them work sweeping and doing some other chores for a few bucks an hour. We always seemed to find ourselves at the shop doing something late at night, so those boys started dropping by regularly. “Hey, Chip and JoJo!” they’d say. “Got any work for us?”

  Being able to mentor those kids just added to the value of being at the shop. I loved that. It was such a good feeling to see those kids fired up about doing some work rather than wandering around after dark, where trouble was sure to find them.

  What I’m trying to say is that I truly loved everything about that shop. But the voice just kept on telling me, Jo, it’s time.

  I wrestled with it for weeks until finally I felt it in my heart. I thought about the words of all of those women who were in my shop every day, telling me to cherish this time with my child. Soon I would have two children whose time deserved cherishing.

  As much as I didn’t want it to be true, I could no longer deny that the voice was right.

  I’m the type of person who can wrestle with something for a long time, but when I finally make up my mind, I’m all-in. This was one of those times. I was lying in bed with Chip one night, and I spoke it out loud. I didn’t pose it as a question. It wasn’t something I needed advice on. I was resolved: “Chip, we’re shutting the shop down.”

  Chip was curious as to why I had come to this decision, of course. And I told him confidently, “God told me to do it.”

  How could he argue with that?

  In March of 2006 we sold off everything—the inventory, the displays, even the cash register. And it was hard. That shop was my dream, a dream that had landed on my yellow steno pad after I came back from my eye-opening internship in New York City. It was the first dream of mine that I’d seen come to fruition, and in many ways it was like our first baby.

  Chip and I had remodeled that old shop with our bare hands. We’d laughed about how many nails had been driven into the old floorboards—there were thousands of them!—and thought about the guy who had put in so much time and effort all those years ago just to make sure those floors were as solid as could be. We were proud of everything we’d done to accentuate the work of those who came before us and to turn that quirky little building into a shop that exceeded the dreams I’d drawn out on paper a few years earlier.

  But the shop was more to me than an accomplishment or even the fulfillment of a dream. It was something Chip and I had dreamed and accomplished together. From scratch. It wasn’t his business that I added to, or my business that he added to. It was ours. At some point every day, no matter what he had going on out at the various job sites, Chip had been there with me, sitting in that little back office at the desk right next to the Pack ’n Play, doing his thing while I did mine.

  I will remember ’til the day I die the moment I stood on the front steps and locked that shop door for the last time as tears rolled down my face.

  Even as I stood on those steps, trying to say good-bye, I kept asking God, “Are you sure this is the right move? If it is, why does it seem so painful and hard?”

  That’s when I heard that gentle whisper, Joanna, if you trust me with your dreams, I’ll take them further than you could have ever imagined.

  It is no easy thing to trust in God, to walk away from a career, to give it all up not knowing if you can ever get it back or even come close. But I did it. I heeded his voice, and somehow I found peace about it.

  We put the shop on the market and hoped to find a buyer for that property as soon as possible. Obviously we wanted to respect it, the way Maebelle had respected it when she sold it to us. We still loved Maebelle, who had become like a grandmother to us. We used to visit her in the nursing home where she lived now and be her guests when they had pancake suppers.

  But we just couldn’t afford to hold on to the building out of principle, the way she had.

  We both would have loved for someone to have saved that old building we’d worked so hard to fix up, but there just wasn’t another Chip and Joanna out there who were looking for a property like that one. We couldn’t keep paying a mortgage on a shop that wasn’t open. So we told ourselves, “It is what it is. We need to move on. We’ll see what happens.” If someone came along and made us a decent offer, we would just have to cross that bridge when we came to it.

  We considered offers from some other developers and business owners and kept trying to make a deal. But for some reason, those deals kept falling through.

  What’s interesting to me is that just as Jo closed up the shop, Magnolia Homes was starting to rock and roll. At the very same moment we were trying to sell that building, we were also looking for some office space for the company. We needed a place where we could hire a secretary to do the books. But we also needed a spot with some outdoor space where we could store supplies and materials, and possibly have a staging area for “the Boys” to gather what they needed before heading to a particular job site for a day.

  I was out driving around with a buddy of mine who’d been helping me look for a good location, and he’d actually found a couple of spots around town, but we had never found a spot that jumped out at me.

  We happened to turn down Bosque as we were driving, and he asked me, “What’s the deal with the shop? Have you sold it yet?”

  I told him we’d hit a few snags and hadn’t been able to close a deal. And right as we were driving past it, he said, “Well, have you ever thought about using that for your office?”

  It was like a giant lightbulb went on over my head. I swung the truck back around and pulled into the parking lot. I looked at that building with a whole new set of eyes. It had the parking lot in the front, but there was also an area in the back that was plenty big enough for a storage unit that could hold the lumber and materials we kept on hand or anything else we might need to store. It had an office in the back that was ready to go. And why couldn’t we turn the front part, where the retail shop had been, into more office space too? The mortgage we were paying on that little building was less than the rent I’d be paying by a pretty good margin.

  “Dude, you’re a genius!” I said.

  The very next day we jumped in and started renovating that store into the Magnolia Homes headquarters, adding the office and storage space that would make it home for our construction company.

  Funny that we needed an outsider to bring that to our attention. We had always seen the building as our shop. But now it was “our” headquarters, and we were getting to hold on to that precious building. We could even keep our Magnolia sign.

  It felt right. The whole thing felt right. Being at home as a full-time mom meant giving up the shop, but it didn’t mean giving up on everything else.

  Chip and I started working more closely together than ever. My design ideas were the backbone of Magnolia Homes, and I’d wind up coming in and out of that construction office as often as Chip had been in and out of the back office when it was my store. In the coming months, I’d actually figure out a way to stay in touch with all of my clientele and my wholesalers and to continue Magnolia as a home-furnishings brand without having a physical shop too.

  I felt good about having made the decision to walk away and lock that door. It’s funny, though, looking back on it now, because one very simple concept in life never occurred to me as I was walking away:

  Even locked doors can be unlocked in time.

  I simply never could have imagined just how much God had in store for us, and I certainly couldn’t have dreamed just how many keys to o
ther doors God had already placed in our hands.

  EIGHT

  DOWN TO OUR ROOTS

  For the next four years, Chip and I were dedicated to one thing: raising our beautiful babies.

  In addition to Drake and Ella Rose, who was born in October of 2006, our family would come to include two more children, Duke and Emmie, who were born in 2008 and 2010, respectively. But when talking about our “babies,” we also mean our business. The reach of Magnolia Homes quickly expanded beyond our little neighborhood on Third Street and into other areas all over Waco.

  We had the opportunity to do all sorts of remodeling and renovation projects in a wide variety of homes, including some beautiful old homes in a historic part of town called Castle Heights. We did work there for some of the people who had frequented my now-closed shop—the wives of doctors and lawyers. And then, when they saw what we were capable of doing, those folks spread the word to neighbors and friends who had money to invest in more extensive remodeling projects.

  This wasn’t just changing throw pillows and paint colors. We put Chip’s growing expertise to work and added the capability and muscle the Boys brought to the table to start tearing down walls, installing French doors, and creating new entryways—all catered to our clients’ tastes through the filter of my own evolving design aesthetic.

  Driving through the Castle Heights neighborhood, I was immediately drawn to it. I think almost anyone would be. It was full of beautiful, stately old homes with well-kept lawns, mostly tucked back off the main roads where there wasn’t much traffic, so kids could play and ride bikes in the streets. And it wasn’t a snobby sort of place either. Neighbors seemed to know each other, and their kids played together regularly. It seemed out of reach for us, and yet once we started working in those homes, I quickly started to dream about living in that neighborhood.

  “Someday,” I said to Chip.

  And, well, you already know how my “somedays” worked out when I spoke them out loud to Chip. But I’ll share a little more about that in a bit.