It was the middle of June in Waco, Texas. The temperature had been up over a hundred degrees for days on end, and the humidity was stifling, amplifying whatever that rotten smell was coming from the kitchen. Chip always carries a knife and a flashlight, and it sure came in handy that night. Chip made his way back there and found that the fridge still had a bunch of food left in it, including a bunch of ground beef that had just sat there rotting since whenever the electricity went out.
The food was literally just smoldering in this hundred-degree house. So we went from living in a swanky hotel room on Park Avenue in New York City to this disgusting, humid stink of a place that felt more like the site of a crime scene than a home at this point. Honestly, I hadn’t thought it through very well. But it was late, and we were tired, and I just focused on making the most of this awful situation.
So we opened some windows and brought our bags in, and I told Jo we’d just tough it out and sleep on the floor and clean it all up in the morning. That’s when she started crying.
I lay down on the floor thinking, Is this what my life is going to look like now that I married Chip? Is this my new normal?
That’s when another smell hit me. It was in the carpet.
“Chip, did those girls have a dog here?” I asked.
“They had a couple of dogs,” he answered. “Why?”
You could smell it. In the carpet. It was nasty. I was just lying there with my head next to some old dog urine stain that had been heated by the Texas summer heat.
It was like microwaved dog pee.
It was. It was awful. It was three in the morning. And I finally said, “Chip, I’m not sleeping in this house.”
We were broke. We couldn’t go to a hotel. There was no way we were gonna go knock on one of our parents’ doors at that time of night.
That’s when I got an idea. We happened to have Chip’s parents’ old RV parked in a vacant lot a few blocks down. We had some of our things in there and had been using it basically as a storage unit until we moved in. “Let’s get in the RV. We’ll go find somewhere to plug it in, and we’ll have AC,” I said.
As we stepped outside, the skies opened up. It started pouring rain. When we finally got into the RV, soaking wet, we pulled down the road a ways and Chip said, “I know where we can go.” It was raining so hard we could barely see through the windshield, and all of a sudden Chip turned the RV into a cemetery.
“Why are you pulling in to a cemetery?” I asked him.
“We’re not going to the cemetery,” Chip said. “It’s just next to a cemetery. There’s an RV park back here.”
“Are you kidding me? Could this get any worse?”
“Oh, quit it. You’re going to love it once I get this AC fired up.”
Chip decided to go flying through the median between two rows of RV parking, not realizing it was set up like a culvert for drainage and rain runoff. That RV bounced so hard that, had it not been for our seat belts, we would’ve both been catapulted through the roof of that vehicle.
“What was that?!”
“I don’t know,” Chip said.
I tried to put it in reverse, and then forward, and then reverse again, and the thing just wouldn’t move. I hopped out to take a look and couldn’t believe it. There was a movie a few years ago where the main character gets his RV caught on this fulcrum and it’s sitting there teetering with both sets of wheels up in the air. Well, we sort of did the opposite. We went across this valley, and because the RV was so long, the butt end of it got stuck on the little hill behind us, and the front end got stuck on the little hill in front of us, and the wheels were just sort of hanging there in between. I crawled back into the RV soaking wet and gave Jo the bad news.
We had no place to go, no place to plug in so we could run the AC; it was pouring rain so we couldn’t really walk anywhere to get help. And at that point I was just done. We wound up toughing it out and spending the first night after our honeymoon in a hot, old RV packed full of our belongings, suspended between two bumps in the road.
The next morning, someone from the RV park spotted us and was kind enough to call a tow truck. The first truck they sent wasn’t big enough, so they had to call in a semi tow truck. One of the big ones. We were freaking out, of course, ’cause we were flat broke. (Are you starting to pick up on a theme here? We stayed flat broke a lot of the time early on.) We didn’t know how we were going to pay this guy. But then our very last little honeymooner’s miracle came through. That truck driver said, “Well, guys, it looks like the honeymoon is over. This one’s on us.”
This was just the way things were with Chip. He was always going out on a limb, but God always had a way of looking out for him. Actually, God seemed to always be out on that limb with him, taking care of him. We should have been more careful not to spend every last dollar on our honeymoon. But that favor from that sweet man made us feel as if maybe some things were just meant to be.
By the light of day, we went back to the yellow house full of hot stink, and I made up my mind right then and there to make the best of it. I pulled myself together and rolled up my sleeves (as people say), and I said to Chip, “Okay. Let’s do this.”
What else could I do? This was our home now. We didn’t have any other options. I covered my nose and mouth and started cleaning. Once the two of us got the worst of it out, Chip went off and took care of some business. There were rent checks in from his other houses that needed to be cashed, and as soon as we had a few dollars in hand, we hit the hardware store.
I had never done anything design-related at that point, but there was something very liberating about starting from scratch. We knew every room needed to be painted, all the carpet needed to come out, and all the hardwood floors needed to be refinished. And Chip gave me free rein to make that home whatever I wanted to make it.
To be honest, I didn’t know what I wanted to make it, so I started with one basic idea: “I have, like, six favorite colors, so I’m going to paint every room one of those colors.”
Once I got going, I decided that using different colors in every room wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to make every room a different theme. I went with a nautical theme in the front room and decorated with a bunch of cheap sailboats and netting that I bought at a hobby store. The kitchen was French-inspired, so it was mustard yellow. Our bedroom was hotel-inspired—all white. The back room was Chip-inspired, so it was cedar and horns and cowhides. Every room was completely different.
We did every part of this renovation together with our bare hands. Chip restored all of the wood floors, all the tile work—everything. I was learning as we went, but I definitely did my part.
That house was gorgeous. Jo did an awesome job helping fix it up, and her ideas were great. There was a moment in the kitchen when I smarted off, though. I don’t even remember what I said, to be honest, but Jo got real mad and started yelling. She was carrying this five-gallon bucket of primer. She slammed it down on the ground to make a point, and it splashed right back up in her face. It was dripping off her eyelashes and her nose.
Whenever something like that happened in my family, we’d all just laugh, you know? So I laughed, even though she was mad at me, and that made her even angrier. She started yelling again with the primer dripping all over, and I just had this moment where I looked at her and everything seemed to be going in slow motion and I thought, I love this woman. She is tough! Oh, this is gonna work.
That was our first real “fight,” and even now we both agree it was our biggest. Chip had smarted off about something, so my blood was already boiling, but when I slammed that bucket down, Chip says I became a ninja—the kind you don’t want to mess with. Yet he still laughed, against his better judgment. We joke about it now, like, “Well, I’m mad, but I’m not primer-in-the-face mad.”