The Magnolia Story (with Bonus Content)

by Chip Gaines

  Some of my early decorating jobs featured all sorts of brand-new pieces of furniture and décor. But I quickly learned that it was the old pieces, the quirky pieces, and the classic pieces that people talked about.

  The quirky piece of cabinetry with all sorts of little nooks in it that came from an old hardware store, with notches on the side and little pencil markings where someone used to keep various size bolts organized—I put that piece in my home, and no matter who happens to see it, they’ll wind up touching it or saying something or asking questions about it. There’s a life to these old things, and I started to buy more and more of them just to rotate them in the house and play around with how they fit in different settings.

  In fact, I was buying so much that I decided to try something new. The one thing I missed most when I started working from home was the interaction with all of my shop clientele, so I thought, Why not open up a shop right here at home? Instead of having a store that kept me busy sixty hours a week, I gathered inventory as I went along and decided to open up my house for a Magnolia trunk show three times a year. I filled four rooms of our home with all sorts of finds and displayed them with the same attention to detail I’d paid to the interior design of my shop. Then I invited all my old clients—and all our new neighbors—to come by.

  Those trunk shows were more successful than I ever could have imagined. Not only did I sell a lot of product and make some good money, but the neighbors and their friends all had a chance to see what I’d done to the interior of our Castle Heights home. Suddenly all of these folks with really nice homes started asking us to remodel their homes. In about a year’s time, with four babies and no advertising or marketing budget whatsoever, we made the jump from renovating eight-hundred-square-foot student-rental houses on Third Street to remodeling some of the finest homes in Waco.

  By this time our own home in Castle Heights had been featured in some regional magazines. All that attention meant I started putting pressure on myself to always have my home look clean and put together. But with my older children now toddling around, I found it became harder and harder to maintain both a showroom of a home and a practical space for my family.

  One afternoon about four years into this new routine of working from home and making a name for Magnolia Homes, I collapsed onto the couch in a state of complete exhaustion. I only had an hour at most before at least one of the kids woke up from his or her nap. I stared at their toys strewn all over the floor and under the end table, and it stressed me out that I had to pick all that up yet again.

  And that’s when I first realized that something wasn’t right.

  I thought about how often I found myself frustrated when the kids would play in the formal living and dining areas. There I was on my couch, in my “beautiful” house, knowing that our business was growing like crazy and I had everything in the world to be thankful for—yet feeling like a total failure.

  I looked around and saw a lot of “perfection,” and I thought, But where do my kids sit? Why don’t the kids have a play space of their own anywhere in this house?

  Suddenly it hit me like a ton of bricks. In my nonstop efforts to make the house look good and to raise our baby of a business, I had failed to create a space where my children could thrive and be kids. I had neglected to create a home that my most important babies could love too.

  ELEVEN

  HOME-LESS

  JoJo, you awake?”

  Of course I wasn’t awake. It was midnight. Chip had awakened me from a sound sleep. “What is it?”

  “A neighbor called. There’s a homeless guy on their front porch, and they aren’t sure what to do. I’ll be right back.”

  Even though I was only half-awake and he had caught me completely off guard, there was no way I was leaving this to chance, so as he left the room, I called after him: “Do not bring him home with you!”

  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but off I went. And that night, on a neighbor’s front porch, I was introduced to Cedric, a guy who had made a lot of bad choices in his life but who had come to the end of his rope.

  I knew Jo wasn’t about to have Cedric come sleep on our couch with four babies asleep inside. And I could tell our neighbors needed him to leave as well. So I came up with the only plan I could think of. At one o’clock in the morning, we went to the store and I bought a few blankets and towels, and I took him to a flip house we were about to put on the market. The next day when I went back to check on him, Cedric was still there.

  We needed to get that house into final shape for an open house, so Chip offered to put Cedric up in a hotel for a few days in exchange for his doing some work for us. Cedric said yes. He was so grateful for the shelter we had given him that he got out there and worked his tail off for us. It’s as if all it took was one chance for him to discover his own work ethic. He started attending a Bible study after that and received services from the Mercy House, a halfway house of sorts that helps people with problems get back on their feet. Come to find out, Cedric had just gotten out of jail, and here he was turning his life around thanks in part to our tiny little bit of help. It was awesome to witness.

  As difficult as it was sometimes to put up with Chip’s out-of-the-blue surprises, the size of that man’s heart brought tears to my eyes. Whether it was a homeless man in the middle of the night, the troubled kids who went to school on Third Street, or neighborhood kids by the shop on Bosque Boulevard, Chip somehow managed to notice them and touch their lives. He became a mentor and father figure to so many people.

  Sometimes his kindness and generosity scared me to death, of course—especially when he would stop to pick up a hitchhiker or help someone whose car had broken down on the side of the highway. And I really did push him to do less of that after we had children. But that’s just Chip. He can’t seem to help it. He’s always looking out for someone who looks like they need a break or a helping hand.

  He has been modeling those same ideals to our children from the time they were born, and to watch him teach them to value people, to look them in the eye and say “Thank you” and “Hello,” is wonderful for me. Chip just automatically does these sorts of basic things that a lot of us overlook and don’t realize make a difference.

  When I was in my twenties, I thought I’d grow up to be the most liberal parent in the world, but I’ve actually turned out to be pretty strict and old-fashioned. I’m teaching the kids to always say, “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” and I don’t want them playing video games or sitting around doing nothing all day.

  I’m right there with him. If these kids want to play, I want them to use their minds and their hands and to go outside.

  It’s funny how Chip can be so liberal on one hand and so conservative on the other, though. He really is unpredictable. I saw it from the very beginning, and I learned again and again that I simply could not put this man in a box. Just as soon as I would get in the rhythm of some preconceived expectation I thought he fit into, he would turn on a dime and do something completely unpredictable. Then I would have to readjust and recalculate until I finally realized there are just no stereotypes that fit Chip Gaines.

  It wasn’t too long after our adventure with Cedric that Chip came home with an even bigger surprise: he’d found a couple who wanted to buy our Castle Heights house, so he’d gone out and bought us a new house to move into and flip.

  “What?” I said. “Chip, I love this house.”

  “You were just saying this house isn’t good for the kids.”

  “I know, but we can change that. I mean, Chip—this isn’t just another house. This is a forever house.”

  “Jo, this was never meant to be our forever house. We’re not ready for our forever house. This isn’t everything for us. It isn’t everything we want. This is a flip house. It’s a big flip house. It’s a nice flip house. But it’s still a flip house. We knew that going into it.”

  When Chip drove me over to see the new house, I didn’t say a word in the car. I was mentally and emotionall
y preparing myself so I wouldn’t lose it. It was a long, gray, one-story, shotgun of a house that had been built in the go-go-blandness of the 1980s. It had no character. It had no charm. It had no style. It was in a great little pocket neighborhood called Carriage Square, but it sat on a smaller lot than the rest of the houses there, and it backed right up to another family’s chain-link fence without so much as a sliver of a backyard. It had a tiny little sloping front yard, too, that ran right into the street. Nothing stately. Nothing old. Nothing beautiful.

  I hated it.

  Of course, you have to remember that Jo pretty much hated every new flip house we moved into when she first laid eyes on it. I think this one just stung a lot more because we were coming from such a gorgeous old home.

  Maybe we had stayed there a little too long. It had been years by the time this all unfolded. We were getting comfortable in that house. And I’ve gotta say, I don’t like it when things get too comfortable.

  To me, it’s a motivation thing. Comfort is what you do when you retire, so if there’s any way you can keep pushing off that “I’m completely comfortable” idea, then it keeps you a little wily; it keeps you young; it keeps you hungry.

  It’s kind of Rocky-esque. In those movies, Rocky Balboa had all the hunger and desire when he was starting out. It wasn’t until after he had the money and the car and the house and the wife and the kid and the dog that something happened and he lost that fire.

  For me, I’ve always thought of moving as a part of that motivation. Houses to me are just investments—inventory, if you will. That’s it. So if we’ve got the money to live in the house that we’re in, well then, great. But whenever things get tight, then it immediately comes back to “Hey, this is just an investment.” It’s like the car dealer who drives the BMW for a couple of weeks knowing if all hell breaks loose, he’ll sell the car. Because, again, it’s just inventory.

  Once we settled into the Castle Heights house, I think we both started to settle into a groove. The business was rocking and rolling, and so we started to think, We’ve made it. We’re here. Let’s just put everything on autopilot.

  But here’s something I’ve noticed. Whenever you do that, whenever you’re all settled in and think that’s it—that’s when the big blow comes that knocks you back down to square one.

  That hadn’t happened . . . yet. In fact, Waco was pretty steady. We didn’t experience the tsunami of economic slowdown that the rest of the country experienced after the housing market collapse in 2008. As we rolled into 2010 and even 2011, the effects of that were just starting to make their way into the Waco economy.

  Even that didn’t affect us personally, not right off the bat. But I could already see that it was taking us a little longer to move flip properties. Rental income dropped a little bit too. It was just these little incremental things. I wanted to make sure we hedged against that, and the best way I knew how to do that was to sell our current house, take that equity, and downsize a bit. Then we could coast a while if our new home sales or our flip properties took a little longer to sell.

  There was another motivating factor to move quickly, too, on top of the fact that I just thought it was time to break out of our comfort cycle and maybe kick our lives into second gear again. In early 2011, we started up a big new investment project. We’d decided to go ahead and develop a tract of land not far from that new shotgun house. It was land that we’d invested in with some of the money we’d made back when my dad and I sold most of our eleven acres on Third Street.

  The reason my dad and I had never developed the eleven acres ourselves was that we had lacked the basic knowledge we needed to get it done. Back then we’d been guessing at everything, figuring out where to put streets and curbs and how to get permits.

  At one point we thought we could put forty houses on that land. And that was important, because there’s tremendous economy of scale when you do a project that big. You can buy all of your lumber and concrete and everything in bulk, which lifts your profit margins in a big way. But we couldn’t make the forty houses work. We found out that the bank was only going to lend us enough money to build eight units. Eight! That just wasn’t enough.

  So we kept messing around with it, and the most we could get financing for was twelve units. That still didn’t make economic sense. So we sold the land on Third Street, keeping a little bit of it by the road to put our twelve houses on. And the big developers we sold the land to, who actually knew what they were doing and had the financing, came in and put more than fifty units of student housing on that back parcel of property alone.

  We’d struggled to figure out how to get forty units on the entire tract, including the front piece that we’d ended up keeping. They were just better at it than we were, and I learned a ton just by watching that project come together. I knew they were going to make millions of dollars on that deal. So as excited as I was to make hundreds of thousands, I promised myself that one day I’d be doing deals like theirs.

  Now, all those years later, I was smarter than I’d been back then. I had more pull with the banks, I had a bigger crew, and I knew people who could draw up the plans and help get the permits through the city. So we got that whole process started, and I knew that it was going to take a lot of money up front to get it done.

  That just served as yet another incentive for us to move into the Carriage Square house. Living in that smaller place would cut our mortgage payment in half.

  I didn’t even like the looks of that house as an investment property, let alone a place to continue raising our family. Yet because of the way Chip does business, I quickly came to the conclusion that—once again—there was no fighting this decision. It was already a done deal. A great couple already had their hearts set on our Castle Heights home, and Chip had already sunk the down payment into that shotgun house at Carriage Square.

  By this point, I had learned to adjust my thinking quickly since I never knew what Chip would come up with next. I wanted to stay comfortable, but I finally started to realize that with change comes new opportunity. Even though I was sad to leave our home, I quickly got on board with Chip and thought of all the new memories our family could make in a new place. There was a part of me that was challenged to create beauty in a house that seemed to have no potential.

  Once again, we didn’t want to do renovations while we were living in a house with four little kids, so we set about doing the renovations just as quickly as we possibly could, before we had to leave that Tudor dream house behind in the rearview mirror.

  The guilt I felt over not creating any space in the Castle Heights house where my kids could be themselves was still hanging over me when all of this unfolded, and I made myself a promise that I would make a special place for them in this new house. I think that was my first ever truly intentional design goal: I wanted to make this next house be much more enjoyable and accessible and comfortable for our family. And the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to be intentional about giving each one of us our own things to love about this new house—even if I didn’t love the house itself.

  So how will I go about doing that? I wondered.

  I was getting more and more confident about my eye for detail, my ability to find great furniture and objects at flea markets and yard sales and to let the character of those old finds shine through in a way that made any room more interesting. But I’d been applying most of that vision to other people’s houses through our renovation and flip projects. I’d even applied it to how people would view our own home—what might look good in a magazine shoot, what people might want to buy when they came to a Magnolia home show, and what might inspire them to hire us to come tackle a renovation project in their home.

  As we prepared to make that transition to a smaller house, with a much smaller yard and only one story of living space, I decided to focus in on us. How could I remodel this house to make it work for us?

  I would still adhere to the things I’d learned about classic color schemes and using lots of
wood and putting three-dimensional objects on the walls, even using pieces that were traditionally for the outdoors. All of those things that appealed to other people were also what appealed to me, so I wasn’t ruling anything out or purposefully thinking about making it unattractive to anyone else. I just wanted to put us first. All of us.

  I started thinking a whole lot about another mentor of Chip’s, Uncle Ricky, the attorney uncle of his college friend—the one who had helped him set up the fireworks-stand business over a couple of summers. What Uncle Ricky did was create this wonderful home environment for his family. He built a beautiful house that was brand-new but looked like it was a hundred years old, and his stunning backyard made you feel as if you were stepping into a vacation somewhere far from Texas the moment you walked out onto their screened-in back porch.

  He built up that backyard over many years, adding a cute little setting here and then another cute setting over there, incorporating all sorts of antiques they purchased over the years. I always loved to go there because there was always some new, interesting treasure to see in that backyard.

  I don’t know if Ricky or his wife have any idea how inspiring that was to me. It wasn’t on public display or anything. Nobody but their close friends and family knew any of that stuff was there. It was just for them. But whatever they did, they did it well. And if they couldn’t do it all at once, they just built it up over time. They even named the place Teaberry Farm. Ricky had a hat made up with “Teaberry Farm” right on it, and he wore that hat pretty much every single day.

  Ricky also kept a bunch of animals back there. They had chickens and goats, and he was always messing around doing something on his tractor. That part of it was a real inspiration to me. He just made life look fun. All those animals and all of those antiques were just a hobby to him. He made his money as an attorney. But he put that money to work in a way that made me want to get to a place like that one day.