Joanna Gaines 50 Home Decor Solutions For Your New Fixer Upper House

by the time chip and i managed to combine these two conflicting sides of himself the kid who steered clear of trouble and did the right thing and the kid who rode his big wheel full speed into the street without looking both ways i had never met anyone like him it's funny to me to think that the whole opposites attract thing might have been programmed into my dna just as my outgoing mother was drawn to my quiet dad i was a shy girl drawn to the super outgoing chip gaines and the fact that he owned a successful lawn and irrigation business and had made up his mind that he loved waco and wanted to stay put was somehow a perfect fit with everything i knew i wanted myself joe didn't even realize that the lawn and irrigation business i was running when we had met was actually the third version of that business that i had launched i'd managed to start each of these lawn businesses from scratch built the clientele and then i'd sell it lock stock and barrel meaning clientele equipment employees to somebody else and that was on top of getting into the business of buying and selling rental properties plus a little corner wash and fold business that i'd started i'd almost forgot to mention that it all began when i tracked down the former owner of the lawn service that took care of baylor university's landscaping remember when i'd look out the window and wish that i could trade places with the guys mowing the grass well that guy worked for this man and his name was david and when i asked him for a job he didn't even think twice he looked me right in the eye and said no david was this real interesting guy who lived in a loft apartment he'd built inside the lawn company in his warehouse you'd never guess by looking at him but i swear he was worth a million dollars i chatted him up the way i chatted lots of folks up and i wouldn't take no for an answer i wanted to get a job cutting grass to learn the trade from the inside out so i asked him how did you get your start he said i don't know i quit school in the seventh grade and just started mowing grass i kept asking questions and he kept answering them turns out he was really really smart and he basically became a mentor to me i grew to call him uncle david it's almost like i was sitting at his feet and as if he were some old guy whittling on a stick on the front porch teaching me these million dollar life lessons so i was getting the academic side at baylor and learning common sense from one of the most common sense guys on the planet it was a perfect education for me oh and he finally hired me i was persistent if nothing else and i grew to love that man even though he was really hard on me he wasn't a real encouraging guy by nature as a matter of fact he used to joke to all of his buddies that hiring me was like losing two of his best guys but i didn't mind i always had thick skin thick skin and a positive self-image so it took a lot to shake me but one day after having worked a few months under uncle david i was on campus mowing with his guys and i saw a fraternity soccer game going on at the intramural field a few blocks over well like a dog after a squirrel off i went to watch leaving my weed eater right then and there time got away from me and it got dark before i knew it my heart dropped when i got back to find my guys all gone and no sign of the weed eater that weed eater cost what i made in a month so i knew i was in big trouble i hitched a ride back to the shop and with my tail between my legs i told him what had happened he was upset but more in a i trusted you kind of way you know like when your parents tell you that they're disappointed rather than yelling at you sometimes it's just worse david made it clear that if i ever did something like that again i was gone and i promised i wouldn't right then and there i grew up a little i realized having fun was one thing but jacking around on someone else's dime and being flat out disrespectful was a complete other issue i promised myself i'd never disrespect someone in that way again i must have done all right after that because uncle david and i rocked and rolled together for a whole year without a single hitch then one day he said to me son you're smart you're going to baylor university what are you doing working for me go start your own business you've already seen what to do go do it he sent me to an equipment company in town and i priced everything out and the total for what i needed to get started came to five thousand dollars and i didn't have five thousand dollars they told me to go across the street to the bank and try to get a loan so i crossed the street met a banker named carol fitzgerald i had learned a few basic things about putting a business plan together at baylor but i didn't think that was enough to get me alone with no collateral and no experience carol didn't think so either and he quickly said no but i wouldn't let up i was a perpetual salesperson i talked carol's ear off saying look i've got five lawns and i could start tomorrow that means i'll be making x amount of dollars and i'm going to quadruple that in a few months and you guys are going to make every cent back plus the agreed on interest i promise carol finally gave in and lent me the money my first 5 000 loan i walked out of the bank walked back across the street to that equipment company and spent every penny on those things that i needed to start this business off the ground i repaid that loan in six months i was so excited by the whole thing i got hooked hooked on starting businesses hooked on borrowing money all of it i still joke with carol to this day that he created a monster i love borrowing money that was my senior year of college and over the course of the next few years as i've said i sold that business off more than once i built it up to over a hundred accounts with a crew equipment a truck and then i sold it to somebody else who wanted to get into the business themselves to be honest i never made a ton of money off of it i treated it more like a part-time thing i had a lot of expenses paying the crew and everything but i basically flipped that business the way i'd later start flipping houses there wasn't always a ton of profit but it was enough to keep you in the game until you could hit a lick and do it all over again i was well on my way to building it up and getting ready to sell it again right when i met joe chip had basically gone through this whole education in the real world of entrepreneurship and he told me all of these stories as we were first stating i was really in awe i'd never met anyone who was such a go-getter at such a young age or who did things in such an unconventional way it was like every time he opened a door he encountered another door and another and he just kept opening every door in fact it was his uncle david who sold him the 11 acre property on third street that would eventually allow us to launch magnolia homes that's right so my dad had worked his way up the ladder at american airlines to become a vice president he was making a good middle class living but right around the time i was starting my first lawn business which would have been somewhere around 96 or 97 he got a call from a corporate headhunter that guy said hey we want to recruit you to come over and be the ceo of this office supply products company here in dallas he went through the whole interview process and they wound up offering him the job he was making five times the money he'd been making at american airlines my parents didn't move into a bigger house or buy fancy cars when they came into that money they were just never like that dad didn't do anything with the extra money except stick it in the bank for a rainy day well he wound up paying as much in taxes that first year as he had made the year prior to that so he quickly got passionate about finding ways to save on taxes he got some advice from accountants and the accountant suggested that they start diverting some of their income into investments some properties or maybe a business dad knew i was always thinking up business ideas so he asked me if i could help him find a house to invest in maybe around baylor something we'd be able to rent out the very next day i went and talked to 10 people and found him a house he ended up buying this little ranch on a couple of acres just a few miles from campus for a decent price he didn't want to manage the renting of it so he offered me a little bit of money to manage the place for him i moved into that house with a couple of roommates they paid rent which eventually took care of the mortgage and they also helped me fix the place up a bit we painted it put in new carpets all kinds of stuff and we just had a blast in that little house i love the whole process of helping dad buy that place so i kept calling him hey dad i found this other place you interested well hold on he kept saying let's don't get too crazy i've got this one obviously let's see how this one goes but just hang tight a year or so went by and my buddies all moved out dad and i decided to sell that house i remember he made probably 35 or 40 000 on that house i was really happy for him but i also got to thinking that buying and selling houses was a pretty good business to be in on top of that my parents came down and took me to dinner that night you know what they said we've thought about it and you did a lot of work and that really helped us made some of that profit so here's a check for a certain percentage of that they gave me a few thousand dollars and that got me even more pumped up about doing this whole flipping thing for a business now flipping houses wasn't exactly a thing back then so people thought i was crazy when i told them that i wanted to do this for a living but the wheels of my head just kept turning and turning and i was determined to find a way to make this work i knew my uncle david owned 11-acre track of land on third street with a couple of old rundown rental properties on it so i asked him if he'd be interested in selling he wasn't doing much with the property and the houses weren't in great shape at that point so he agreed my dad and i went in together on that second deal since i had built up a little cash from the lawn mowing business we bought that 11 acre track for around 110 000 that was certainly a lot of money but we knew david was giving us a really good deal to this day i'm still thankful to him for that opportunity dad and i also went in together on buying a little commercial building right on the edge of baylor's campus we rented one corner out to a sandwich shop and i opened this little wash and fold laundry business on the other corner that was basically the last time the two of us went out on a project together because as i was a co-signer on those two loans the bank became more comfortable with me on my own mortgage that's when i got started on the whole mayor of 3rd street endeavour i realized i could make as much money flipping a house as i made running the lawn care business for the entire year so when i met joe she said i had already been through this entire education you know half formal and half street i was ready to keep this entrepreneurial life rolling and it was after she closed the door to her little shop that things really started to click for us there was something just fantastic about what she and i did together that was far bigger than what either of us were capable of on our own and i knew i wasn't the secret ingredient i knew how to work hard and how to find good deals but when we worked together on magnolia homes it was joe coming in at the end and putting her finishing touches on everything that made all the difference in the world she was what was so special about our company selling off the bulk of the 11 acres gave us a pretty good windfall just before she closed that shop we invested that money into some more land and sank it into a few more of the smaller flip properties we were used to doing we got started building a house from scratch too our first real spec home featuring all of joe's design ideas that she'd gathered from running her shop and working with this clientele people loved it then joe mentioned to me that she'd like to live in a place like castle heights someday and i figured well maybe we could get into one of those houses that's a little bit of a fixer-upper we could live there renovate it and flip it for a much higher profit than we do in these little student house type flips sounded like a bigger risk going in but i was confident we'd be able to get a bigger return on the backside so it really wasn't any more of a risk than we were doing on the smaller homes i worked out the numbers in my head and i said well why not i truly thought it would take years of savings and discipline for us to get into a house in that neighborhood but just a few months after i closed the shop chip stumbled onto an opportunity to pick up a gorgeous 1920s tudor style house in castle heights the interior was outdated and the exterior had been neglected the curber pill just wasn't there we'd been living in such small homes that to us this place looked like a mansion but to people used to living in nicer bigger houses it looked like a nightmare so the owners had priced it right thankfully we had enough cash for a down payment and at that point we had the credit it would take to make the house ours with four babies we figured it wasn't a great idea to live in a house and renovated at the same time so we did the renovations on the castle heights home quickly before we moved into it and the impression we made was instant the neighbors couldn't believe how good the exterior looked after just a couple of months all we did was paint the exterior and rework the landscaping but it drew all sorts of attention apparently nobody had thought to apply the same sort of fast-moving flipping house style renovation ethic to homes in that neighborhood but we did things right and we did quality work we just did things quickly because that's what we were used to doing when you're flipping homes there's a season to it there's times of the year when things really sell and there's times of the year when they really don't and so you get into the schedule of working overtime so you don't lose a shot at making money the longer you hold something the more the interest on the loan will eat into your profit joe and i used to make these little bets with each other to see how long or how fast we could work she would say you did the floors in two days on that last house i bet you can't do it in one this time i'd stay upstanding until two in the morning just to make that bet and i'd argue that it still counted because it was the same day at the same time we were renovating the castle heights house things were kind of picking up everywhere from magnolia homes we built our first house in town and people were in line to come see our open houses people were just so taken with joe's design that they would come to the open houses even when they had no interest in buying the house they would just want to talk to us you know we've got this kitchen down the street it really needs some help we don't know what to do is there any chance we can get you to do our remodel we would leave an open house and walk down a few blocks to meet with people who were almost begging us to come do work for them all this happened so quickly we seemed to unleash some sort of lightning in a bottle when we started working deals together i was able to do 90 of that work from home too i would hire a babysitter and go out to see a property or check on a job site for a couple of hours here or there in any given week but i could do all of the actual designing without leaving my kids by using photographs of the location and a sketch pad and eventually incorporating some design software that i taught myself how to use on the computer the fact that i was all of a sudden able to do that work from a 3 600 square foot dream home in castle heights just seemed beyond imagination i was in heaven nearly every house in that neighborhood was like a one-of-a-kind work of art there were homes with grand pillars next to more modern mid-century homes next to tudor style homes next to bungalows built in the 20s and 30s just looking out from our new front porch provided me with all sorts of inspiration and inside our home i let my inspiration run wild i poured everything i had learned up to that point into that house i had taken to looking at all sorts of architecture and home magazines and i wanted my home to be worthy of that kind of attention so much of what made that house special however had nothing to do with what i could do to it in fact the best thing i could do for it was to let its character and history come back to life the reality is that old houses that were built a hundred years ago were built by actual craftsmen people who were the best in the world what they did the little nuances in the woodwork the framing of the doors the built-in nooks the windows all had been done by smart talented people and i quickly found that uncovering those details and all of that character made the house more inviting and more attractive and more alive a lot of modern houses in the suburbs are big and beautiful and i don't want to run anyone down but sometimes when you look closely it's almost like a beautiful woman with a little bit too much makeup on our castle heights homes seemed to just get more and more beautiful the more joe wiped that makeup away mixing the old and the new bringing our own sense of history into the home that became really important to me i think there's something about things from the past that just calls to us that triggers a kind of longing sometimes you look at a piece of furniture or an old clock or a piece of artwork whatever it might be and you're just drawn to it you think why do i love that piece well chances are it's because it reminds you of something something from history something from childhood maybe even something you lost this can be true whether the piece is extremely unique and one of a kind or just plain classic take subway tile for example subway tile is the most basic affordable product in the world it's not a high-end type of material but you go into any bakery that ever inspired you maybe one in france or you look behind the counters in some cool old restaurant and what do you see on the walls subway tile you look at the old pictures of the new york subway system or delis and coffee shops from 100 years ago that just draw your eye and make you long for a simpler time and there it is putting those tiles in a home just works for me they'll never go out of style they'll never seem dated and the more time i spent in that old house in castle heights the more that notion sank into my heart and showed itself in my work it's funny how people will get caught up in trends it's almost like the shag carpet thing of the 70s people who put that in their homes weren't thinking hey let's go be dumb they were thinking this is great it's gorgeous but there are a lot of trends that just come and go and what joe was aiming us towards was setting a standard that's the complete opposite of trendy i mean why would i want to encourage my client to use the new hot color when i know that in a year or two she'll need to paint the walls again just to get rid of it i wouldn't want to do that in my own home and i wouldn't want to waste all that time and money i suppose we could have gone in a different direction i mean we're business people right why wouldn't we want to convince our customer to do a new color then we'd be back every year or two going oh you're not still doing that orange we talked about last year are you that is so outdated here we can give you the newest green for like ten thousand dollars that's just not who we are and honestly i'm a creature of habit i've done my makeup the same way since i was 13 and i've always had long hair i think i've just always liked classic the castle heights house sort of focused me in on it more in terms of design but in personality i was always that way i find something i like and i stick with it ironically that's how chip is too he's worn the same brand of boots since we married the same brand of jeans since we married and the same old basic white shirt so going after classic long lasting looks just made sense to me my knack for finding antiques and interesting pieces at markets and garage sales certainly didn't die when i closed the shop down i kept it up in the interest of staging our flip homes and open houses and i kept many of those most interesting pieces i found for us i started to get more creative and how to display my finds too building upon the idea that three-dimensional objects add character when they're hung on walls an idea that started with the fencing window treatment i used in drake's first nursery i started hanging baskets on the walls and then baskets with plates in them i hung antique gates up to add texture along with interesting pieces of wood branches and other things you might not normally expect to see on a wall i started making trips to canton texas which holds a famous open-air flea market every month called first monday trade days there i found lots of old authentic pieces from all over i frequented the twice a year trade days in roundtop texas too and as i did so i realized my design aesthetic was evolving i stopped looking at all the scratches and the scrapes on the old pieces of furniture's flaws i love that they told the story of a family that had once eaten at that dining room table or whatever the story might be so instead of thinking about how i could refurbish these pieces i focus on how i could highlight their imperfections like houses these pieces with the best bones were the most fun to bring back to life and the most profitable when i got done some of my early decorating jobs featured all sorts of brand new pieces of furniture and decor 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 the notches on the side and little pencil markings where someone used to keep various sizes of 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 a shop right here at home instead of having a store that kept me busy 60 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 fines 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 on the interior of our castle heights home suddenly all 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 800 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 thrown all over the floors and under the end table and it stressed me out that i had to pick it all 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 room in the dining areas there i was on my couch and 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 where do my kids sit why don't why don't the kids have a place space of their own anywhere in this house suddenly it hit me like a ton of bricks in my non-stop effort 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

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Length: 22min 47sec (1367 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2020