by Chip Gaines
The two of us went home in absolute awe of what had just happened. Then we sat down and considered how best to use that money. There were a number of invoices that were due in two days. But for a moment, we wondered if maybe we should invest the money in a quick flip house, something that might turn that money into $150,000 and give us some leeway to pay other bills. But that would mean putting some people off by thirty days or more, and that just didn’t feel right to us.
So what did we do?
We both looked at each other and said, “Give it away.”
We didn’t mean “give it away” in the sense of philanthropy, but in recognizing that this money wasn’t ours. It was owed to others. So we sat down and wrote out $100,000 worth of checks. We were completely broke again within a week, but everybody got paid. Every bill was up to date. With that check, we were able to buy ourselves another month or so of time to get back on our feet. It’s sad looking back, because even with a miracle like that, we still had our doubts.
We both realized quickly thereafter that this was no fluke. It had been the story of our life together, ever since we’d met. From the very beginning, I feel like we had encountered miracle after miracle that allowed us to get by and survive. Now it was happening on a much bigger scale—in hundred-thousand-dollar increments. But maybe we should have been paying more attention to those little miracles all along. We were now both out on that limb, and we looked up and saw God right there with us.
Somehow we were always wily enough to get ourselves out of a financial pickle by finding the money from somewhere. Or so I’d thought. But this was not us being “wily.” This couldn’t be anything but the grace of God.
Did those earlier “breaks” come from the same source?
Getting that $100,000 check just made us open our eyes and see that whenever we’d needed a break, when a house would sell or rent would come through just in the nick of time—God was there orchestrating. We were just so overwhelmed with all this.
Maybe getting to the bottom all those times, and especially that time, was some sort of a test. A test of will maybe, a test of faith, a test of our resolve to stay the course in following our dreams and to do the right thing when it came to how we treated others. I don’t know.
What I do know, looking back on it now, is that all of these big, life-changing things were right around the corner for us at that moment. And if we’d given up, if we’d walked away, if we’d crumbled when we were at our lowest, we never would have made it around the corner to see all of the blessings that were about to come due.
THIRTEEN
SURVIVING OR THRIVING
I’m not sure what it was about moving into that little shotgun of a house that brought so many revelations to the surface. But right in the middle of our financial crisis, I had yet another awakening—a true lightbulb moment, just as I’d had when I decided to design our living space for us. And this new revelation was also sparked by the laughter of my children down the hall.
I’d managed to put that house together in a way that made my family happier than perhaps we’d ever been. We all had space to be ourselves and to be together, even though this home was half the size of our previous one. The only problem I seemed to keep running into in that smaller space was that there just wasn’t enough room to keep all our stuff contained. Even though the kids had their own living room, everything still seemed to spill out everywhere all the time.
I was still working hard to make this house perfect, which to me meant not only giving it some character and bringing it to life, but also keeping it clean and uncluttered. And it seemed as if all day, every day, I spent most of my time picking up after the kids, yelling at them whenever they spilled a glass of milk, then mopping the floors one more time. It was exhausting.
I was finally taking a moment for myself one afternoon, plopping down on our old sofa with the new slipcover, when I made the mistake of looking down. My beautiful, brand-new, snowy-white slipcover was covered in little black fingerprints. I mean, there were fingerprints everywhere.
I looked up and noticed that the whole house was messy again—a shoe here, a sock there, a pile of toys on the coffee table. I had already spent half the day cleaning. And everything in me wanted to stand up and go yell at those kids for not washing their hands like I’d told them to a thousand times. I also started yelling at myself in my mind: What mother in her right mind would buy white slipcovers for a sofa with four little kids in the house? I mean, really. White? I was so mad at myself and the kids that I was just about to lose it.
Then I heard the kids down the hall.
They were playing in one of the bedrooms, and the whole lot of them erupted in laughter over some silly thing. Their giggles were so full of joy. The sound of their little voices pierced my heart.
I looked back down at all of those tiny fingerprints on my white slipcover, and I realized something surprising: Someday I might actually miss those little fingerprints.
Right then and there, I knew I had been focused on the wrong things. And I realized I had a choice to make.
I could go in there and yell, ruining their little moment and then having to spend another hour of my life trying to clean up the mess that they’d made. Or I could choose to let it go. I could go play with my kids and maybe get a chance to share in that laughter right alongside them.
So what if my house wasn’t perfect?
It was perfect just the way it was.
I realized that my determination to make things perfect meant I was chasing an empty obsession all day long. Nothing was ever going to be perfect the way I had envisioned it in the past. Did I want to keep spending my energy on that effort, or did I want to step out of that obsession and to enjoy my kids, maybe allowing myself to get messy right along with them in the process?
I chose the latter—and that made all the difference.
This revelation was so much more than a lightbulb turning on in my head. I felt as if a hundred pounds got lifted off my shoulders that afternoon. I remember sitting there on that sofa going, “Holy cow. I can breathe.”
It all came down to a mind shift in which I asked myself, “What am I going for in life?” Was it to achieve somebody else’s idea of what a perfect home should look like? Or was it to live fully in the perfection of the home and family I have?
My revelation wouldn’t mean that I would never clean my house again. It wouldn’t even keep me from throwing that slipcover in the washing machine—eventually. My kids do tend to play better and act better in a clean environment, and Chip appreciates a clean home too. My family inspires me to want to keep our home clean for them, and I personally can’t think straight in an environment that’s too cluttered. And yet the time I spend with my kids is worth far more than the time I spend cleaning.
Right then and there, I made up my mind to stop cleaning the house during the day. If that meant I had to stay up an extra forty-five minutes at night doing dishes or cleaning up the living room after the kids were in bed, then so be it. I also vowed to set up better storage systems and to teach the kids that everything had a place. But I wasn’t going to obsess about any of that. Not anymore.
That day changed me. It really did. And I quickly found that my shift in mind-set had a positive effect on our life together. Now when someone spills a glass of milk, I don’t worry so much about the mess. Instead, I try to focus on my relationship with the one who spilled the milk.
I still have my bad days, believe me, when I see that milk for the mess that it is and I yell, “Oh, come on!” I get mad. I’m not perfect. But I recognize now that yelling is always the lesser of two options. The better option is to use that moment to teach them, “Well, you know what? I did that when I was a kid too. We all make mistakes.” Followed by, “How about you help me clean this up?”
What I’ve found is that something as common as spilled milk can turn into a rich moment with my kids. And for years my misguided perfectionism robbed both them and me of those moments. And I can’t help but
wonder how many other moments I robbed from my kids and from my husband while trying to attain some vision of a perfect home that I was never going to attain anyway.
Before my slipcover revelation, I never allowed the kids to paint or do projects on my dining-room table because it was my “favorite table.” Today, not only do I let them do their projects there, but I’m the one who instigates it. “Okay, we’re going to paint, kids!” Why? Because I replaced that “perfect” table with one that’s all scuffed up and only gets better looking with age.
I also tried to set aside various spots throughout that home where my kids were expected to make a mess: in their living room, on that table I just mentioned, I even carved out a spot in the kitchen where they could cook and have fun experimenting with food. That way I could be prepared, which means I wouldn’t overreact. And that in turn meant my kids could be kids, and I could be a better mom. It was all connected.
The funny thing to me is that whenever we had people step foot into our house after that, they seemed more wowed by it than any other house I’d designed or lived in—including the 1920s dream house in Castle Heights.
That got me thinking about the pressure we women and moms are all under these days. It seems as if the standards are so much higher than they were just a few years ago, mainly because of what we see whenever we look on the Internet.
It used to require some effort to feel like an inferior mom and wife. A woman would have to go to a newsstand and spend six dollars on a magazine to see the current societal standard of “What my family and home are supposed to look like.” Now it just shows up on social media everywhere you look, and it always seems to be picture-perfect. That’s all anyone seems to post—perfect pictures of perfect families enjoying perfect moments.
Along with that, I think everyone’s expectations of themselves have gotten so much higher. I mean, honestly, as a stay-at-home mom, every time I had a moment to open Facebook or Pinterest I would walk away thinking, I’m not doing enough. And then I’d start second-guessing myself. I think that’s what I started to overcome with those revelations in my own home.
It’s funny that these revelatory moments of mine happened on couches in two different houses, and I wonder why that is. But I don’t have to wonder about the results of those moments.
Shortly after I sat on the couch at the Castle Heights house and really noticed for the first time that I wasn’t happy, even though I’d worked so hard to make everything look perfect, I had a conversation with a friend of mine. I was exhausted all of the time, and I said to this friend: “I feel like I’m just surviving at this point. I’m not thriving.”
Once I was in the Carriage Square house and embracing the laughter and messiness of my kids and not cleaning all day long, I realized that it was up to me to flip that switch from surviving to thriving. It was just a mental shift, a readjustment in my way of thinking—like seeing my kids’ fingerprints as kind of cute instead of a miserable mess.
I actually made that particular mental shift right after I had my Carriage Square revelation. It happened instantly—just like that—right after I made the decision to enjoy my kids instead of obsessing over making everything perfect. I looked down at those fingerprints—I was still on the couch—and suddenly they looked completely different.
Then I got to thinking about the bigger picture: If I’m going to sit around and say I am “just surviving” every day, well, guess what? When a big wave comes along suddenly, I won’t be surviving—I’ll be drowning!
I mean, that’s life. Life is never predictable. Life is never really manageable. If your mind-set is always, “I’m just surviving,” it seems to me that would wind up being your mind-set for the rest of your life. You’d just get stuck in it.
So I finally flipped the switch in my mind. I said, “I have to choose to thrive, even in the pain. Even when it’s tough.” And it was tough. While I was coming to this conclusion, we were right in the middle of our whole financial mess. We’d managed to escape just under the wire through that God-given $100,000 check, but we were still in trouble.
The miracle of that breakthrough moment for me is that I didn’t really let our situation get to me. I didn’t wallow in it. I didn’t allow it to dictate my happiness. I was scared, sure. But for now at least, we had our house; we had our kids; we had our health; and we were living this beautiful life together. And I told myself, “I want to make all that count in this season, because otherwise it’s just going to be a waste.”
I didn’t want to look back at this experience and regret how I handled it. I wanted to say, win or lose, that we believed in love, that we had faith, and in essence we fought the good fight. I didn’t want to be found a quitter or a doubter. None of these things would have been helpful to Chip anyway. So even though I didn’t feel it some days, and even though I shed my fair share of tears, I woke up every day and told myself, “We can do this. God has not brought us this far to let us down now.” And I would tell Chip, “You got this. Most guys would collapse under this pressure, but you were built for this!”
This paradigm shift seemed to work, and I know Chip appreciated it. As a parent, as a wife, as a business owner, I simply decided: “I’m not going to survive anymore. I’m going to thrive.”
It wasn’t some big life-altering change that was difficult to achieve, either. It was instantaneous. I just realized that I had a choice to make in every moment, on every day, with every decision.
I made that choice, when the next glass of milk was spilled, to choose a thriving response rather than the surviving one. And I made that choice when another gigantic bill landed in our mailbox that day after the last of our $100,000 miracle was spent. Was I going to just survive this? Or was I going to get with my husband and think this through so we could overcome it together and thrive?
I still had my moments when I’d make the wrong choice and get all fed up and start fussing at the kids or Chip or start beating myself up over some mistake I’d made. But the more I kept asking myself that question—the more I focused on thriving—the shorter those “just surviving” moments seemed to last.
There was something in that low point with our business that drew Jo and me closer together. My usual optimism seemed to slip. I wasn’t sure we were going to find our way out of this one. But she took on this really positive attitude about everything that helped me get through it.
I always said, “When things come against us we can either turn on each other, or we can come together and turn on it.”
We almost started to reverse roles in that season, where she was the one telling me that it was all going to be all right and that even if it wasn’t, then that would be all right too. We were together, and our kids were good, and that was all that mattered. We were thriving—that was the way she put it.
I wasn’t sure I believed her, to be honest. I was terrified we were about to lose everything. But the irony of it all is that just as we hit a low point where I thought we might slip into bankruptcy any day, the local newspaper caught wind of what we were doing with our development and decided to do a front-page story about us: “What a neat thing you’re doing over on that side of town. You guys want to be in the paper?”
I didn’t focus on our problems when I talked to that reporter. I just described all of the pros of this development and what a great project it was for that area of town and for Waco in general. I hoped the buzz would convince someone that one of the Magnolia Villas houses would be perfect for them. That would mean we could actually start building them and maybe start selling some.
The article came out, and a couple of days later, a lawyer in town called me up. He told me his mother was living out on some acreage outside of town, and she needed a home that was smaller and closer to everything and easier to manage. We talked for a few minutes about what we were planning, and I told him why I thought one of the villas might be perfect for her, and by the end of the conversation he said, “I want one.”
“You want one?”
&nbs
p; “Yeah. How much is it?”
“Well, the model that sounds right for your mom is $176,000 and change.”
“Great. Okay, meet me at my office on Wednesday and bring the contract.”
“Okay, great,” I echoed.
Now, the way things usually work, somebody wants to read the contract and get a second opinion and then bargain with you on the price. Then, even after they sign an agreement to buy the place, there are usually contingencies, and they have to take whatever down payment they have and go out and secure a loan. It’s a long, slow process that sometimes ends with nothing happening. So I didn’t get my hopes up too much about that one. But I was encouraged, and I was even more encouraged when the front-page article resulted in dozens of calls just like that one. I felt like we were on our way.
I went ahead and met with this new lead and I handed him the contract. He started reading it over. “Let’s see. Yep. All right. This is just a simple residential contract. So, you ready?”
I said, “Yeah. I’m ready to rock. So you’re telling me you’re gonna be our first Villa? Wow, this is such a big deal. Thank you, man. I appreciate it!”
“No sweat. I’m going to sign right here, and if you don’t mind signing right now, I’ll have my secretary make some copies.”
I signed, and he signed, and he handed it to his secretary. I stepped out to use the restroom. And when I came back, I found that this man had written out a check for the full amount and stuck it under a little paper clip with the contract.
“All right,” he said. “Go build Mom a great house. When do you think this will be ready? You think four to six months ought to do it?”
“Yes, sir. I promise. It will be four months if we’re lucky—six months worst-case scenario if we hit some bad weather or something. But I’ll let you know. Thank you. Your mom’s gonna be thrilled. I promise.”