At one point I found a large brown wicker sleigh for five bucks. I couldn’t believe how cheap it was. I thought to myself, If I dress this thing up a bit, I could sell it for twenty-five dollars. Off to the local craft store I went. I found a fake ivy garland to wrap all around the sleigh and some battery-operated Christmas lights that I tucked into the ivy. I was so proud of the way it turned out that I thought maybe I could sell it before the shop even opened and get a taste for how this would all work. So I talked my father into putting it in his waiting area at Firestone with a price tag on it.
But a week went by, and I noticed the sleigh was still there. The second week, I called my dad. “Yes, JoJo, it’s still here. But don’t worry. It will sell.” The third week went by, and I told my dad that if it didn’t sell, I would just come pick it up and get it out of his way. At that point I felt deflated. I questioned more than ever if running a store was what I was supposed to be doing. But I went in toward the end of that third week, and my father handed me an envelope with twenty-five dollars in it. “I told you it would sell,” he said. “Now go buy something for twenty dollars and see if you can sell it for fifty bucks. This is how retail works, JoJo.”
Selling that sleigh made me feel like I could do this design thing despite the odds—and my lack of experience. But the more I shopped for bargains that I could turn around for profit, the harder it was to choose between what I wanted to sell and what I wanted to use to finish turning our house into a home over on Third Street.
It took nearly eight months to get it to a point where that yellow house finally felt finished. I was so happy to be done, to be free of the dust and debris and tools everywhere, and to finally get the place neatened up and livable. I don’t like a lot of clutter. I like a clean house. If my house is too messy, I just can’t think straight. And remodeling a house is messy by definition. So nearly eight months after being carried into a house full of rotten meat and dog urine, I was thrilled to finally have a place where we could be comfortable. I was proud of what we’d done too. I hoped we’d live there for a long time, and I was ready to focus all of my energies on the shop.
Then Chip came home one afternoon and said, “Hey, Jo, I bought a new house.”
“Oh,” I said. “To rent out?”
“Well, eventually, yeah. We’re gonna be able to rent this house out now, because we fixed it up. It’s ready to go. So let’s move down to this next house a few doors down and we’ll fix that one up, too, as nice as we made this one. We’ll be able to make better rent on everything if we make ’em all look this good.”
As I rode down the street with him to see what he’d bought, I was in shock when he pulled up in front of this tiny white box of a house. I mean tiny—maybe eight hundred square feet. There was no cute front porch. The yard—front and back—was all weeds and overgrown bushes. When he opened the front door on that cabin-size house, I could see it hadn’t been touched in thirty years.
She cried. Again. That was sort of her thing during year one. If we ever write a marriage book, chapter 1 will be called, “She cried.”
Chip assured me this was the right thing to do. This was how we were going to get ahead and make real money. He tried to remind me of the fun I’d had fixing up the yellow house, and I had to admit that some parts of it had been fun. I’d loved coming up with the themes for the rooms, and picking out all the colors and textures, and learning how to do the work myself. But the yellow house wasn’t just some house to me after doing all of that work. It was my house. It was our home.
But Chip never saw it like that. He really never got attached to anything that didn’t have a heartbeat. These houses, they were just inventory to him. He liked messing with them, but he certainly didn’t want to live in any of them forever.
Even though he didn’t understand why I was upset, he was smart enough to just leave me alone for a little while. I went back home and sat on the porch and thought, How can we just rent this house out to college kids? My house. We’d only been in there eight months. Then I got to thinking about how much work it had been, and the idea of starting from scratch again seemed daunting, especially with everything I was trying to do to get the shop opened up. I cried it out until I reached a point where I realized there was nothing much I could do about it. He’s already bought it, so we’re kind of in this now. No one is going to rent that little white house out in the condition it’s in.
One thing I learned there on that beautiful front porch was if I wanted to be successful, if I wanted to do important work one day, I would have to increase my capacity. I had to learn to manage disappointment. I needed to learn how to make the most out of those “opportunities” Chip seemed to keep finding.
So I told Chip okay. We rented our house out that very week to some college students and moved ourselves down the block. We started renovating again. And because this house was half the size and I was already actively out there looking for inventory for the shop, it didn’t take nearly as long to get everything finished.
We did suffer a few setbacks, like the time Chip decided to surprise me by using maroon grout on the white tile in the kitchen. He could tell I didn’t like it the moment I walked in the room, and he wound up ripping it all out and doing it all over again. I’m not sure why I had such clear ideas about what I liked and didn’t like, but I did. And the funny thing is that after a couple of months, once I had put my stamp on it, I was as much in love with that little house as I had been with the yellow one.
She jokes to this day, “I liked that house because I could vacuum the whole place without ever unplugging the cord.”
I could plug into one outlet and vacuum every room! I loved that. It’s true.
Back at my shop, the one thing I was having a hard time designing was a sign for the front of the building.
Chip and I had decided together that our little shop would be named Magnolia. I’ve always loved magnolia trees and their blooms—there’s something so beautiful about a magnolia blossom. It demands attention, and you can’t help but love those big, creamy petals and that fragrant smell. We’d handed out magnolia leaves at our wedding, and we’d had those two beautiful magnolia trees in the front yard of our first home together, so magnolias have always seemed like a part of us. Plus, they just seemed so entirely Southern. They reminded me of drinking sweet tea on the big wraparound porch of a nineteenth-century plantation home or something.
The name Magnolia just fit my business and the feeling I wanted to create. We loved it. But I really struggled with how to put the name on that sign. I figured I would have to hand-paint the thing since I didn’t have a budget to have anything professionally made, and I just couldn’t come up with anything that worked. I kept drawing things out, trying to write the word Magnolia in different ways, using the flower itself in a logo of sorts, and it just never felt right to me.
Then one day Chip showed up with the back of his pickup truck just loaded with old metal letters he’d found at a flea market—big, oddly shaped letters taken from various old signs. They were mismatched and rusty and dented—and I loved them. We tacked them up on the front of the shop, spelling out the name that would come to mean so much: Magnolia. The letters were uneven and looked a little handmade and ragged, but it seemed to work. I loved this sign because Chip designed it and made it with his own two hands. It came together in such an imperfectly perfect way, and I hoped people would get it.