Joanna Gaines Fixer Upper Houses 52 Popular Home Decor Ideas To Make Your House Look Elegant

picked up the phone and within two words i realized this was the type of call no businessman wanted to receive it was my banker hi chip he said even those first two words sounded a bit shaky hey man i've got some bad news he continued but i don't want you to worry man we'll get through this could there be a more chilling way to start a conversation i couldn't imagine what we were about to get through and i was completely unprepared to hear the news he was about to tell me months before this chip and i had basically gone and put all of our eggs into one basket and no i'm not talking about the eggs we were collecting from chips chickens over the past four years we had gone from being these mom and pop remodelers and house flippers maybe doing one two properties at a time to tackling five eight ten properties at a time the boys had grown into a big crew and we had become masters of our trade the economies of scale had finally tipped in our favor the fact that we were buying building materials in bulk meant each individual project was that much more profitable right from the start i'd been rolling the profits from one flip into the next we wouldn't even see the money before it was gone invested in the next one and then the next and every single time i did that i made money anyone i borrowed from whether it was my dad a good friend an investor they made their money back plus the interest every time it seemed as though i'd really had the minus touch i'd learned so much by that point that i decided it was time to do what the big boys did when my dad and i sold the 11 acres to that big development firm the guy i shook hands with wore a 50 000 rolex i didn't covet that watch but i did envy a success now i was sure i too could handle this kind of big endeavor doing a few houses at a time spread out all over town meant that a lot of time and money was spent on separate crews and trucks and hauling things all over the place the way to make money was to put a large development together with multiple homes all in one place so that's what i set my sights on we basically stopped buying new flip houses and instead poured all of our money into developing this piece of land that we'd been sitting on the plan was to create a neighborhood called magnolia villas 38 comfortable affordable little first-rate homes all designed by joan we'd even gone and opened up a real estate arm of our company so that all the sales and the sales commissions on this whole deal would come our way it was a great plan it really was but it takes a lot of money to put a plan like this together and that meant putting up all of our eggs into this proverbial basket and taking out a massive line of credit from the bank i'm not going to talk about the exact numbers here but it was a huge line of credit that we'd budgeted every dollar for permits roads water and sewer lines electric hookups estimated building materials and contracts with additional crews also we could get those houses built quickly and sell them in time to start paying back that line of credit from the profits we had to do it quickly because basically every day that line of credit remained open it represented a large amount of interest i trusted chip completely with this his instincts had been right every time we'd jump into something new plus i was excited about the homes themselves with this newfound sense of purpose and my mission when it came to design i drew up plans for the most adorable functional livable spaces i'd ever imagined these were smaller homes but i had plenty of first-hand experience with that i knew how to design a small home that i could love one that would be filled with open spaces and hideaway spaces and the kinds of texture and surfaces and a little touches that would make a person feel welcome before he or she even opened the attractive solid wood front door the problem is there weren't going to be any doors or anything else we got the plans all approved we had the road crews come in to lay out and pave all the streets we had the sidewalks and the gutters in place and all the proper drainage we needed in order to start building these actual houses and that's when the banker called us with this bad news the tidal wave of economic despair that had swept through the rest of the country had already crippled housing developers in far-off places like miami las vegas had finally reached waco texas the federal government had come in and told the banks they had no choice but to pull back on any pending loans and lines of credit and not just pull back a little but pull back by half we don't have a choice about this my banker told me the line of credit we needed to get this project completed had been suddenly cut in half and if we couldn't complete the project we would have no way to repay this loan and here's the thing we had already received nearly half of this line of credit we'd already used it to make non-refundable down payments on everything we needed to get started we had materials on site there was no way out i'm sitting there going joe we're into this thing for a ton of money i've got invoices sitting on my desk that are due to be paid some in 30 days some in 45 days what are we gonna do everyone we'd worked with up until that moment had been paid on time so they had no idea we were standing on the edge of this cliff no one had any idea that there was anything wrong if we called them now they'd all be hit just as hard and shockingly as we'd been hit by the bank's news my banker insisted he would help us get through this and he did we came up with a plan we had managed to save some money that we had tied up in a cd so we cashed that in our banker friend even weighed the penalty so we wouldn't lose the little bit of interest that we'd earned joe had some cash that she'd saved up on the side too just like she'd done way back when she opened the shop the banker was able to open up some smaller lines of credit so we could pay some of the bills while we tried to pull the rest of this together all of this took a lot of finagling and creative thinking those big developers in miami in las vegas would have just wiped their hands at this thing and walked away declared bankruptcy maybe and said adios in fact many of them did but joe and i just couldn't do that we wouldn't do that there was no way we were going to let anybody we'd made promises to not get paid after all of that scrambling after everything was said and done after we literally poured everything we had into trying to fix this thing we were still a hundred grand short of the finish line chip and i prayed together a lot we were doing well in our new house the kids were happy and we did our best to hide our problems from them even as our stomachs clenched at the breakfast table and we felt like breaking every time the mailman brought another stack of bills that we had absolutely no money left to pay it wasn't just a matter of paying construction bills now we were literally tapped out in a few weeks time we would have nothing left to pay the electric bill and the mortgage on our home where we lived with our children we were still working on some remodeling projects in fact i was doing the best work of my life and we brought in some money through that work but it wasn't nearly enough so at that point all of our praying led us to do something that felt completely radical to us i reached out to two friends of mine and i'm using that term pretty loosely these were people i didn't know real well i'd worked with them a little bit here and there they were fairly comfortable financially not rich by any means but they were the type of people that might have a little bit of money in the bank and might be interested in earning a better return than the one percent that the banks were loaning at the time i took these two guys to lunch and as sick as i was on the inside and as much of a panic as i was in i tried to keep the conversation all business so look i'm in a bit of a pickle i explained it's not bad news like i'm in this huge bind or something but we do have this development called magnolia villas underway and we would really be interested in youtube financing the completion of it the bank has essentially capped us at an amount that was much lower than we had initially agreed on i explained what the status of the development was and what we had done to raise the money so far i've got all the work on the ground but i still need a hundred thousand dollars to get us across the finish line i explained i asked them for fifty thousand dollars each and laid out some terms on how quickly we believed we could pay each of them back with interest it was a fair deal and even though i'd kept it focused on the business aspects i basically felt like i had spilled my guts to these two guys one of them was completely silent didn't say a word the other guy i don't know man sounds too risky to me he asked a lot of questions and seemed really nervous about the deal in general i've never had anybody react that way to a deal of mine ever it felt like a kick in the gut in their defense this was just not really what they did for a living they were not angel investors or financial gurus they were just good guys that i thought just might want to get into this deal with us long story short they both walked away without much commitment and seemed generally uninterested they were much better friends with each other than they were with me and i hope that maybe maybe the one guy that was being silent would be able to be on my side and would convince his friend to not be so skeptical i walked away feeling a little bit like russell crowe's character in that boxing movie cinderella man i wonder if i was going to have to be that formerly proud man who had once been on the top of my profession and now had to wander around with all my cronies asking hat and hand if i could borrow a few dollars just to buy my kids some milk we decided we'd better sit down and go over everything again we went through the old invoices that were still unpaid and the new ones that had come in since we got the news and we realized that we now had one hundred thousand dollars in invoices sitting there so even if those two men decided to make the investment which at this point seemed very unlikely all of that money was already spent and we'd be back to falling behind again the very next month unless we could pre-sell some of the houses or encounter some other windfall a couple of very long days went by and i finally got a call from the silent guy had taken to lunch he said hey man i really want to see the development my wife and i want to meet you guys over there and maybe walk the properties just get a better sense of exactly what you're talking about so we met him over there on the site and those two walked around just as calm as they could be this is beautiful they said wow this is awesome they said wow i was hoping you'd think that so what do you guys want to do why did you want to come walk the site i know that meeting was a bit rough the other day he said i just want you to know that i've never done this kind of thing before but when you were talking you were really speaking my language i admire how hard you fought to keep this project alive and make sure that everyone gets paid and i was actually eager to help out but i wasn't sure if it was just my heart talking you know so i went back and i told my wife about it and we prayed about this and well we've decided that we're going to give you a hundred thousand dollars i reminded him that i only felt comfortable with the fifty thousand dollar investment so that we could spread the risk out i know but we prayed about it and we just feel that this is the right thing to do you're going to do great here we need this kind of development in waco and we have no doubt you're going to sell all of these houses and it will make a big difference to a lot of people and if you don't well as i said we've prayed about this so we don't want you to worry even if you never pay us back we've already imagined that so if this doesn't work out like you hoped just don't worry about it we're already over it we don't want this to be a bit awkward as far as our relationship is concerned my knees almost gave out it took everything in me not to break down right then and there this wasn't like a best friend who would bend over backwards to bail you out of trouble they were just acquaintances at the time so for them to say something like that came as a complete shock they had that hundred thousand dollar check with them and they handed it to us right then and there the two of us went home in absolute all 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 30 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 a hundred thousand dollars 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 that miracle 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've 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 a 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 we thought but this was not being wiley this couldn't be anything but the grace of god did those earlier breaks come from the same source getting that hundred thousand dollar check made us open our eyes and see that whenever we 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 by all of this maybe getting to the bottom all those times and especially that time was some sort of a test a test of will may be a test of faith a test of our resolve to stay the course and following our dreams and to do the right thing when it came down 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 had given up if we had walked away if we had crumbled when we were at our lowest we never would have made it around the corner to see all the blessings you

Channel: Home

Views: 163,634

Rating: 4.9161243 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 7f7aAMhQjlw

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2020