In March of 2006 we sold off everything—the inventory, the displays, even the cash register. And it was hard. That shop was my dream, a dream that had landed on my yellow steno pad after I came back from my eye-opening internship in New York City. It was the first dream of mine that I’d seen come to fruition, and in many ways it was like our first baby.
Chip and I had remodeled that old shop with our bare hands. We’d laughed about how many nails had been driven into the old floorboards—there were thousands of them!—and thought about the guy who had put in so much time and effort all those years ago just to make sure those floors were as solid as could be. We were proud of everything we’d done to accentuate the work of those who came before us and to turn that quirky little building into a shop that exceeded the dreams I’d drawn out on paper a few years earlier.
But the shop was more to me than an accomplishment or even the fulfillment of a dream. It was something Chip and I had dreamed and accomplished together. From scratch. It wasn’t his business that I added to, or my business that he added to. It was ours. At some point every day, no matter what he had going on out at the various job sites, Chip had been there with me, sitting in that little back office at the desk right next to the Pack ’n Play, doing his thing while I did mine.
I will remember ’til the day I die the moment I stood on the front steps and locked that shop door for the last time as tears rolled down my face.
Even as I stood on those steps, trying to say good-bye, I kept asking God, “Are you sure this is the right move? If it is, why does it seem so painful and hard?”
That’s when I heard that gentle whisper, Joanna, if you trust me with your dreams, I’ll take them further than you could have ever imagined.
It is no easy thing to trust in God, to walk away from a career, to give it all up not knowing if you can ever get it back or even come close. But I did it. I heeded his voice, and somehow I found peace about it.
We put the shop on the market and hoped to find a buyer for that property as soon as possible. Obviously we wanted to respect it, the way Maebelle had respected it when she sold it to us. We still loved Maebelle, who had become like a grandmother to us. We used to visit her in the nursing home where she lived now and be her guests when they had pancake suppers.
But we just couldn’t afford to hold on to the building out of principle, the way she had.
We both would have loved for someone to have saved that old building we’d worked so hard to fix up, but there just wasn’t another Chip and Joanna out there who were looking for a property like that one. We couldn’t keep paying a mortgage on a shop that wasn’t open. So we told ourselves, “It is what it is. We need to move on. We’ll see what happens.” If someone came along and made us a decent offer, we would just have to cross that bridge when we came to it.
We considered offers from some other developers and business owners and kept trying to make a deal. But for some reason, those deals kept falling through.
What’s interesting to me is that just as Jo closed up the shop, Magnolia Homes was starting to rock and roll. At the very same moment we were trying to sell that building, we were also looking for some office space for the company. We needed a place where we could hire a secretary to do the books. But we also needed a spot with some outdoor space where we could store supplies and materials, and possibly have a staging area for “the Boys” to gather what they needed before heading to a particular job site for a day.
I was out driving around with a buddy of mine who’d been helping me look for a good location, and he’d actually found a couple of spots around town, but we had never found a spot that jumped out at me.
We happened to turn down Bosque as we were driving, and he asked me, “What’s the deal with the shop? Have you sold it yet?”
I told him we’d hit a few snags and hadn’t been able to close a deal. And right as we were driving past it, he said, “Well, have you ever thought about using that for your office?”
It was like a giant lightbulb went on over my head. I swung the truck back around and pulled into the parking lot. I looked at that building with a whole new set of eyes. It had the parking lot in the front, but there was also an area in the back that was plenty big enough for a storage unit that could hold the lumber and materials we kept on hand or anything else we might need to store. It had an office in the back that was ready to go. And why couldn’t we turn the front part, where the retail shop had been, into more office space too? The mortgage we were paying on that little building was less than the rent I’d be paying by a pretty good margin.
“Dude, you’re a genius!” I said.
The very next day we jumped in and started renovating that store into the Magnolia Homes headquarters, adding the office and storage space that would make it home for our construction company.
Funny that we needed an outsider to bring that to our attention. We had always seen the building as our shop. But now it was “our” headquarters, and we were getting to hold on to that precious building. We could even keep our Magnolia sign.
It felt right. The whole thing felt right. Being at home as a full-time mom meant giving up the shop, but it didn’t mean giving up on everything else.
Chip and I started working more closely together than ever. My design ideas were the backbone of Magnolia Homes, and I’d wind up coming in and out of that construction office as often as Chip had been in and out of the back office when it was my store. In the coming months, I’d actually figure out a way to stay in touch with all of my clientele and my wholesalers and to continue Magnolia as a home-furnishings brand without having a physical shop too.
I felt good about having made the decision to walk away and lock that door. It’s funny, though, looking back on it now, because one very simple concept in life never occurred to me as I was walking away:
Even locked doors can be unlocked in time.
I simply never could have imagined just how much God had in store for us, and I certainly couldn’t have dreamed just how many keys to other doors God had already placed in our hands.
EIGHT
DOWN TO OUR ROOTS
For the next four years, Chip and I were dedicated to one thing: raising our beautiful babies.
In addition to Drake and Ella Rose, who was born in October of 2006, our family would come to include two more children, Duke and Emmie, who were born in 2008 and 2010, respectively. But when talking about our “babies,” we also mean our business. The reach of Magnolia Homes quickly expanded beyond our little neighborhood on Third Street and into other areas all over Waco.
We had the opportunity to do all sorts of remodeling and renovation projects in a wide variety of homes, including some beautiful old homes in a historic part of town called Castle Heights. We did work there for some of the people who had frequented my now-closed shop—the wives of doctors and lawyers. And then, when they saw what we were capable of doing, those folks spread the word to neighbors and friends who had money to invest in more extensive remodeling projects.
This wasn’t just changing throw pillows and paint colors. We put Chip’s growing expertise to work and added the capability and muscle the Boys brought to the table to start tearing down walls, installing French doors, and creating new entryways—all catered to our clients’ tastes through the filter of my own evolving design aesthetic.
Driving through the Castle Heights neighborhood, I was immediately drawn to it. I think almost anyone would be. It was full of beautiful, stately old homes with well-kept lawns, mostly tucked back off the main roads where there wasn’t much traffic, so kids could play and ride bikes in the streets. And it wasn’t a snobby sort of place either. Neighbors seemed to know each other, and their kids played together regularly. It seemed out of reach for us, and yet once we started working in those homes, I quickly started to dream about living in that neighborhood.
“Someday,” I said to Chip.