The Magnolia Story(51)
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 It showed how we were starting over, starting fresh, turning something that was outdated into the home of our dreams, just like we do for our clients.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.