by Chip Gaines
I was walking on air when I left that office. It wasn’t just because the attorney’s check would allow us to catch up and begin to move forward with the rest of the development. I also knew that selling one of those villas sight-unseen would be all the kick-start we needed to eventually sell the rest of them.
People don’t like to shop at a strip mall with one store in it or to eat at a restaurant with only one car in the parking lot. They like to see action, activity, excitement—and that’s what we were going to have at Magnolia Villas. This one build meant we’d have a crew out there now, visibly working and building a beautiful house for everyone to see as they passed by on Bosque Boulevard.
Oh, we forgot to mention that. This development we were trying to build just happened to be right off Bosque Boulevard—the very same Bosque Boulevard where my shop once stood and where our headquarters for Magnolia Homes was still standing. It felt like something more than coincidence to us that we finally had a heartbeat for Magnolia Villas on that very same artery, just a little further to the west.
Anyway, we were so excited about making this the perfect house for that attorney’s mother that we wound up calling her and offering to meet with her so I could show her some paint colors and finishes and design the interior exactly to her liking.
The woman’s name was Peggy, and as her son, Dale Williams, had told Chip, she lived on a forty-acre farm about ten minutes outside of town.
The first time we drove up there, we didn’t think much of it. It was all about the business of finding out what this sweet woman wanted in her home. She invited us to come back up again and have coffee with her and said we should bring the kids. So we did. This property was pretty. There were some beautiful oak trees, and forty acres is forty acres—it’s nice to see all of that open land after living in the crowded way most of us live. But this wasn’t a farm with white fences or a beautiful farmhouse up on a bluff somewhere. It was all chain-link and barbed wire. The house was old and needed a lot of work. It just wasn’t anything that grabbed Chip or me around the collars and said, “Hey! Buy this!”
We knew that Peggy would be selling the place once she moved into her new villa, so you would think the two of us would have been looking at that property as something we could flip, at the very least. But we weren’t. I mean, I tend to be a love-at-first-sight kinda guy when it comes to houses, and I just wasn’t in love with it.
When the kids were all standing there at the end of the second visit, Peggy asked if they’d like to come back and play on her farm again. And the kids all said, “Yes, ma’am!” We’d been inside talking to Peggy and hadn’t even noticed how much fun they were having in that yard, so we were taken aback by their enthusiasm. “Well,” Peggy said, “next time y’all should go down and have a picnic in the pecan orchard.”
“Pecan orchard?” Chip asked.
“There’s a cluster of about twenty hundred-year-old pecan trees out back. It’s a real nice spot for a picnic. Go down there next time,” Peggy said.
So we did. We came back and had a lovely picnic under the pecan trees, and Chip and I both started to see this land in a whole other light. That night the two of us started dreaming together, just as we’d done back in the early days of our marriage.
“Can you imagine what it would be like to live on a farm?”
“Imagine how many chickens I could have on a place like this?” Chip said. He sounded like a little kid. “We could get goats. Cows, even!”
“You could get goats and cows, sure. As long as I don’t have to take care of them.”
“Oh, babe, you wouldn’t have to lift a finger. I want to take care of ’em!” he said.
I of course started seeing the possibilities for that old turn-of-the-century farmhouse. I imagined what was under those walls and what those wide-plank floors might look like if they were refinished. I imagined an addition. I imagined opening it up, moving the walls around, doing my best to give the kids plenty of space to run and slide in there, the way they did in the hallway at our current house.
Then we really got to dreaming: With all of that land, maybe we could put up a cool tree house. I could do more than just garden; I could build a greenhouse so I could garden year-round. We could get dogs again and let them run around free without the worry of neighbors trying to get us thrown in jail.
“I wonder how much they’ll want for the place,” Chip asked out loud. The fact that he’d said it out loud made it seem like a real possibility. Like he was thinking the same thing I was—how perfect this place would be to raise our family.
Peggy was kind enough to invite us to use that land anytime we wanted. “You don’t even need to stop in and say hi. Just treat it like your own,” she said. So we did. We went up to that property about once a week with the kids, letting them run around and stretch their legs and get fresh air. And as construction on Peggy’s villa was nearly complete, Chip found himself completely inundated with Magnolia Villa contracts and prospects.
The whole idea that even a small rock can start an avalanche was certainly playing out here. Villas were popping up like crazy. The lots were selling, and contracts were coming in steadily now after all that exposure in the local paper. Things were really rolling. So months after we’d started going to Peggy’s farm fairly frequently, Chip finally got the nerve to ask her son what the asking price for the property might be.
He said without hesitation that he hoped it would go for around half a million dollars—half a million that we didn’t have and couldn’t even hope to borrow. Because of what had happened with the Villas, our credit was all tapped out. We would be lucky to get a loan on half that much. We couldn’t even get new loans for flips or renovations. The glory days of using bank money to finance our dreams seemed to be over. Even with things flying over at the Villas, the banks needed more proof that they weren’t going to end up stalling out.
Still, we fell so in love with that land—not to mention the idea of what I could turn that house into—that we didn’t want to let go. Chip kept talking to the attorney, who really acted a bit like a confidant or an advisor in that season. We decided to put our Carriage Square house on the market, just in case there was an off chance we could make this work. We figured that with all of the renovations I’d done we would be able to turn a nice profit, and maybe that would give us enough of a down payment to get a loan. If we could get the attorney and his mother to lower the asking price on the farm, we just might be able to make the deal work.
We worked out all the numbers and came to a pretty depressing conclusion. Even if we got our full asking price for the Carriage Square house, we’d still be well under the asking price they hoped for.
The thing is, we’d actually grown pretty close to our attorney friend and his beautiful mother through all of those visits and talks. We learned that he was about our parents’ age and he loved that farm and had all sorts of fond memories of his dad there. The farm was called Covey Rise Ranch—named after a covey of quail. His dad had raised quail dogs on that property—gorgeous bird dogs that he and his dad had spent hours working in those fields.
Chip finally got the nerve to make them an offer, which they promptly turned down. But they did say they weren’t in a hurry and if anything changed for us financially we should definitely reapproach them.
Peggy left the farm and moved into her villa, and she loved it. It was the perfect size, the perfect layout, and she loved the location. She just could not rave enough about that house. We were happy for her. But even as more offers came in for the sale of the villas, we weren’t close enough to paying off our debt or making enough money to allow us to make a better offer on her property for ourselves.
We continued to visit the property pretty often. The kids loved it. We loved it. We just wanted to hold on to our enjoyment of it as long as we could. And one week we were actually sitting on a bench on the front porch of that old farmhouse, with the kids running around the yard, when Chip got a call on his cell phone.
“
Yeah. Yes. Tell them we accept,” I heard him say.
When he hung up the phone, he told me, “We just got an offer on the house. It’s a good offer. A really good offer. I said we’d take it.”
And here’s where things just get crazy. Jo and I believe in miracles, but when we hear stories like this we usually go, “Yeah right. Like that happened!” But as sure as I’m sitting here writing this, my phone rang less than ten minutes later. It was Peggy’s son.
This intelligent, tough lawyer said, “Chip, you know what? I’ve been thinking about that offer, and I don’t know. My mom is happy over in the Villas. You guys did her right with that house.” He spoke as if we’d done her this great big favor by building her a nice home, when in fact they’d been the ones who’d trusted us that the Villas were going to be great.
“So, if you really want the farm, you’ve got yourself a deal. I’ll give it to you for the amount you mentioned before. I can see you and your family loving it out there.” Little did he know that “out there” was where we were sitting at that very moment!
“Oh, wow! That’s fantastic,” Chip said, standing right up with the biggest smile on his face. I got tears in my eyes just seeing Chip’s expression. I stood up, and he gave me a great big hug with that phone still to his ear.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Uh-huh. Wow. You’re kidding! I don’t even know what to say. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
I got off the phone and said, “Jo, you’re not going to believe this. Not only is he going to sell us this place, but he’s wanting to owner-finance it. He said he would actually prefer a little interest on the money, and he felt like this was the best deal for now, and we could finance him out in a couple years when the Villas were closer to being completed.’
Jo said, “What?” At this point we were literally in shock. The kids even noticed that something was going on and came running over to see what was happening.
“Kids,” I said, as Drake, Ella, Duke, and little Emmie all gathered around us. “How would you like it if the farm was our home?”
“Yeah!” they all screamed. They started running around hooting and hollering.
I simply couldn’t believe it. It was far beyond anything I’d ever imagined could actually happen in my life.
“Chip,” I said. “We’re buying a farm.”
FOURTEEN
HEEDING THE CALL
Before we signed papers on the sale of our Carriage Square home, and just before we passed papers to buy Peggy’s farm, my phone rang. On the other end of the line was the woman from a television production company who had the crazy idea to put Chip and me on TV.
It was two weeks later that the camera crew arrived, a few days after that when the houseboat arrived that Chip “surprised” me with and the top guy on the crew told us, “If I do my job, you two just landed yourself a reality TV show.”
It was 2012 by the time an even bigger camera crew came back to film a full pilot episode of Fixer Upper for HGTV, and it wouldn’t be until 2013 that the show would get picked up.
But we never stopped. We never slowed down. Our family just kept pushing, finding our way through. We didn’t know if the TV show would ever really get off the ground. So we just kept working at making the most of our lives, despite a seemingly never-ending spate of financial obstacles.
Since the houseboat wasn’t a livable option, my parents let us move into their house. They had actually bought a place in Castle Heights but later decided to move. Though they’d recently put the house on the market, it hadn’t yet sold. So they said, “Hey, we know you’re working on the farm. Why don’t you just live in our house for a while? We don’t have to sell it tomorrow.”
The timing worked out great, and we were so thankful. It worked out well for the pilot episode, too, since we were right in the middle of renovating the farm, and that made for some good TV. It showed how we were starting over, starting fresh, turning something that was outdated into the home of our dreams, just like we do for our clients.
We loved being outside so much at the farm that the first thing Jo had me build was the big outdoor fireplace. We built the whole thing out of antique bricks we had found. She also got started on a garden. The house became the secondary concern. Every time we got some cash together and went out there to do some remodeling, we always ended up doing another project outside. I guess subconsciously we decided we’d just take it slow and do what we could when we could, which was definitely a change of pace from our normal routine.
We would drive out to the country and sit at what felt like our vacation home, only this vacation home needed a boatload of work. We would sit beside the fire and Jo would tend her garden. And then we would go inside and just mess around, trying to figure out what we could do with whatever money we had coming in.
We knew we needed to expand the house some. We were eventually able to figure out how to create a lot of room upstairs in the attic, which was unused space at the time. But before we built anything out, we ripped things apart hoping to find some old beams and hardwood floors. And when we tore off the drywall, we found shiplap everywhere. So I was instantly like, “We’re using that as our finished wall.” We painted it all white and didn’t bother filling in any of the nail holes or anything. The way I saw it, every one of those nail holes was a little piece of history, and they all added character to the home. And just as important, we saved eight grand in drywall costs right there.
We were always thrifty, and we loved using old materials, making our own things, doing the work ourselves when we could. It was our job. It was our passion. And this farm was our dream. We couldn’t wait until it was time to move in.
Back in the late 1800s, when a place like this was originally built, you had to work with what you had, and you had to figure stuff out. You certainly couldn’t Google it. You didn’t have Internet. You didn’t even have how-to books. You had to sit there and wrestle with it. You found this old spare part, you did this other thing, you hooked it up to a donkey, and you tried it out.
Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. But eventually you’d pop out on the other side and say, “I’ve got this.”
Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve always solved problems like that.
It took us quite a while before we made things happen at the farm and got it to a point that it was move-in ready. Then we stopped and looked back at all we’d done, the good times and the bad. The times when we were literally flush with cash and the times we could barely pay our bills.
Did this mean we were finally out of the woods? It sure felt like it. We had managed to keep our heads above water through some really tough times. And even in those tough times our precious employees had continued to play a huge part in our business. They stuck it out with us.
Some of these employees went way back with us, all the way to the beginning. Most of the Boys who’d helped with my early flips were still around. You probably know a couple of them—Shorty and José—from the show. Even before that, one of the guys who mowed lawns with me, ironically, was Shorty and José’s father-in-law. His daughter was the first girl I ever hired to help run the little corner wash-and-fold business. She’s still with us today—we don’t own the wash-and-fold anymore, but she works for our company. So does Jo’s friend who worked with her before she decided to close the shop.
Looking back, it’s amazing to see how it all ties together. Those people had seen how hard we’d worked to always pay them first, no matter what, during all the tough times. Without even purposefully trying, just by being who we are and doing what we do, we’d created a Magnolia family.
The work we did managed to touch a lot of people’s lives, and it’s just not possible to put into words the gratitude we feel for each and every person who’s helped us along the way.
A couple of our suppliers bent over backward for us during those lean times too. A few of them gave us extra time to pay for some of the materials we needed in order to keep going.
They say it takes a village to
raise a child. I’d like to amend that and say it takes a village to run a small business!
We are glad we doubled down on our renovation business during that tough period. We focused heavily on the real-estate side of our Magnolia Homes business, too, both listing and selling homes in and around Waco and helping buyers find the home of their dreams. We especially liked it when we could find our customers a home that wasn’t quite move-in ready but was in their price range. Then we could offer our renovation services as a way to turn that fixer-upper into a home they would love. Not only were jobs like that fun and fulfilling; they also allowed us to put all of our skills to work—and they were the jobs that kept us afloat financially.
Well, guess what? That evolving business model was just the thing that pushed the concept of a Chip-and-Joanna TV show over the top. The folks at HGTV loved the idea of following home buyers through the process from start to finish, from selection through renovation, with a big reveal at the end when they finally saw the finished product.
I find it interesting that the skills we honed flipping houses had prepared us for the grueling time commitments involved with filming client-based renovations for television. They said all this made for “great TV.” I mean, the timing of it all couldn’t have worked out any better. As with the sizzle reel, we couldn’t have scripted any of these things if we tried.
We didn’t know what made “great TV.” We were just trying to make a living and trying hard to honor the craft we had both fallen in love with over the years.
We’d been in business for more than ten years, and by then I think people in Waco had come to know who we were and what we were all about. So when some of this started hitting, Waco seemed to support us and protect us. We were not stars here. We were just the same Chip and JoJo they’d known and supported for years.