Once I found out I was having a boy, I zeroed in on earthy tones and a sort of outside-meets-inside theme in the room. Instead of the standard baby blue, I wanted something warm and comfortable that would reflect the rest of that luxurious little retreat we’d created. But I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on that little nursery. Any money we made seemed to go right into another project or investment or just to keep up the payments on all the loans we’d taken out.
I realized we just couldn’t afford any extra bells and whistles on that room, not even window treatments. I knew that window treatments can be expensive. But I decided to look at our tiny budget as a design challenge. I stood in the nearly finished nursery one day, just staring out the window, and I noticed the little white picket fence we’d put up in the front yard. An idea popped into my head immediately, “Hey, Chip, what would happen if you went and got some pieces of picket fence at the lumberyard and built an awning out of that wood for the inside of the nursery?”
I sketched it out for him, with the picket fence coming down at an angle from above the windows, kind of like an awning you’d see on the outside of a restaurant. Chip ran with it and figured out how to tack fencing to another board so he could hang it just so. We painted it, and it worked!
I stood back when we were done, looked at that room, and realized something big: having a tight budget doesn’t have to mean watering down the design. If anything, it forced me to get more creative, and there was so much joy in that for me. I loved that awning Chip built way more than I ever would’ve loved a store-bought window treatment. It turned out perfect and taught me one of my fundamental design rules: don’t be afraid to think outside of the box.
People liked those awnings so much that we actually started building them and selling them to our clients. For a season those things were hot!
Well, that was the other thing that happened. Beyond the house flipping and rental properties, we started picking up clients for remodels and redesigns.
As my baby bump grew behind the counter at the store, I found that more and more of those moms and grandmothers who came in to browse started bringing me pictures of rooms in their homes and asking for my advice. “I just don’t like this room, and I don’t know why,” they would say. I would look at those pictures and suggest that maybe they could switch the furniture around or put up something interesting on a wall that had nothing but flat picture frames on it. I would recommend changing the wall color or adding a nice lamp in a nook or adding new throw pillows for a pop of color on the sofa.
It was a new challenge daily, but giving the advice sharpened my design skills, and I learned a few things about my own style in the process. It was an education for me. But more than that, it started to evolve into a second business.
Occasionally I’d point out that a room called for much more than new throw pillows, and the owner would ask, “Well, is that something you could do for me? I’d love to just hire you and Chip to come in and do the work!”
Between building the new house on our newly subdivided lot, continuing work on some small flip homes, and managing the rentals, Chip had more work than he could do himself, so he had put a crew of workmen together. “The Boys,” as we called them, were a talented bunch of hardworking guys who were just as adaptable as Chip seemed to be when it came to making my crazy ideas become reality. I truly could say, “Hey, why don’t we take that tree out of the front yard and hang it upside down in the master bedroom,” and they would do it, no questions asked. (All right, maybe there’d be a little head scratching. But then they’d shrug their shoulders and get to work.) So between all of us, we picked up this occasional additional work doing interiors—painting, refinishing floors, basically redecorating for these new clients.
It wasn’t easy to juggle it all, especially since I was running the store by myself that first year. But I loved every minute of it. There was no doubt in my mind that I was doing what I was meant to be doing.
I wonder sometimes if we know ourselves a lot better than we think we do when we’re children. We get into our teen years and college years, and so many of us let others redefine who we are, or we get lost along the way and have no idea what we really want to do with our lives. But once we finally figure it out, it often seems easy to look back into our childhoods and find a few clues that say, “Hey, maybe you were headed in that direction all along.”
For me, the entrepreneurial spirit was always there. During my young years in Wichita, Kansas, my mom worked at a little gift shop owned by one of her friends. After school my two sisters and I would go there while she worked, and I would always play store. I would sit there and pretend that I was working the cash register. I would have my sisters bring stuff up to the counter, and I would wrap it. I loved doing that. Even when we’d go home, I would set up my whole room like a store and then have fake customers come in. At one point I had a set of Lee Press-On Nails, and I would make my sisters come in like customers to a spa. I was always thinking about ways to make money, so I would basically make my sisters pay me for whatever they were buying, even if it was only a dime.
On the weekends I made a habit of setting up these makeshift little carnivals in our backyard and charging neighborhood kids a dollar to get in. I’d have lemonade and rides (primarily just the swing set) and games. To swing on the swing set would cost you another dime. But I always wanted it to be this fun experience for everyone, so I would work hard all week getting it set up.
My sisters basically provided free labor for me, in addition to having to pay to get in. I’m not sure why they went along with it, seeing that I was the middle child, but they did. Home was the place where I asserted myself, and I wasn’t shy about it the way I was in other places. I felt safe at home and felt like I could be me.
I was also a creative kid, but not in terms of artistry or design or anything like that. I was just always pretending. I kept trying to invent wings so I could fly. I always wanted to come up with something that someone would buy. So I was always thinking.
I remember playing a lot by myself. My older sister and my younger sister, when they weren’t being my minions, were usually out playing with the neighborhood kids, but I could usually be found in a corner playing make-believe. I pretended different things at different phases of my childhood. For a while I was always doing pretend commercials. So if I were eating breakfast, I would hold up the cereal box and say, “Kellogg’s. We make this nutritious.” I would read it like a newscaster and pretend that I was on a commercial. Sometimes I’d do the same thing with the bottle of shampoo in the shower. No matter where I was, I would act out these commercials as if I had a real audience.
That’s another strange thing, considering what I’m doing now. Growing up, I sometimes felt like this audience of mine was always with me, watching me in my pretend store, watching me doing commercials. It was almost as if I was living in the Truman Show, that movie with Jim Carrey in which a character is filmed from the moment of birth and watched by millions as he goes through his daily life. Even if I was by myself, I would look around and think, I know you are out there watching me.
My parents remember hearing me talking to this unseen audience often when I was a little girl. They say I also swore I had a pet rabbit named Jo. But according to my parents, it was just make-believe. It was all the expression of a creative mind.
Anyway, looking back, I can see there were a whole bunch of things in my childhood that pointed toward what I’d do in my adult life. And once I started doing it “for real,” I thrived. It seemed that the more opportunities I had to get creative and get entrepreneurial, the more fulfilled and energized I felt about life.