The Magnolia Story(27)

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 BabyBj?rn 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.