They both got tears in their eyes. “This came at just the right time.”
As I’ve mentioned, they weren’t independently wealthy people, and it turns out they were in a spot where they needed to make some decisions for their family. Having that money at their disposal was going to help make those decisions easier.
Getting both of those loans taken care of felt so good. Those were people who had bent over backward for us. We honestly wouldn’t even be here talking about any of this if it weren’t for them.
Want to hear something even more interesting? When it came to the couple who loaned us that money, we wound up circling back with them. A year after we paid them back, they came to us looking to buy a new house. They even came with a big renovation budget to work with. And guess how much they budgeted for renovations? $130,000. They turned right around and sank that exact amount of money into their dream home. What are the chances? These circumstances were woven in such a way that you had to just sit back and marvel.
Most things in life are just beyond our planning and our control. Even when it comes to the farm, back when we first fell in love with the land, we had all sorts of doubts about spending more money than we had in order to buy it.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” we said.
“Is this stupid?” we wondered.
But now both of us agree: God allowed Peggy’s son to owner-finance that for us. He knew that in this season of life we were about to encounter, we would need a place to retreat to, where our kids could be away from it all and we could center ourselves. We truly believe that God put those plans in action because he knew what we would need as a family, even though we didn’t have any clue what we needed ourselves.
How could we have possibly known that bringing some cameras in to film Chip and me at work and at home on the farm would turn into a big hit TV show? Apparently other people knew. The network people were confident about it. But we certainly didn’t know.
From what we’d heard, reality TV shows were all about people yelling and screaming and flipping tables over for the cameras. What we would come to learn is that every show is different; every situation is unique. The network didn’t ask us to do anything other than be ourselves.
What we learned from being around the folks at HGTV is that shows that have a heart behind them and are authentic tend to have the most loyal audiences. The other thing we have learned about television is we are thankful to be associated with HGTV and with High Noon Entertainment, the production company that films our show. Both have been good to us. They have honored our family, our story, and our town. They didn’t have to do that. And no matter how this all shakes out, we will be forever grateful to them for allowing us to tell our story.
I have to say I’m glad authenticity is something they wanted, because that was all they were going to get from Chip and me. Nobody could ever script Chip Carter Gaines, even if they tried. And I would never have signed on if I couldn’t be myself. I’ve come way too far in my life and career to compromise now, and for HGTV to allow us to be faithful to who we are and to showcase our business and our expertise has been an absolute honor.
We love our kids, we love each other, we love this town, and we love our clients. That’s the heart behind our show. We’re a real couple and a real company, and we do real jobs for people with real budgets. When there’s heart and substance on a TV show, the drama just isn’t needed.
What we do on camera is what we do in real life.
Well, there is one exception: that big canvas. We love to surprise our clients, but we’d never done that before, of course.
Chip and the producer came up with that idea at the very last minute when we were working on the pilot. There was a problem as to how to surprise the client, and as always, Chip got with the Boys and figured it out. I suppose that could be considered a bit of “drama” that we added to the show. But even that came from the heart.
It never gets old—that moment when we pull back that picture and we see our clients’ faces as they experience their fixed-up new home for the very first time. We’ve spent weeks, sometimes months, getting to know these people, and it’s just very moving to us to make them happy. Chip and I both know how important home is, and we love sharing that feeling with them.
That we get to have a show like this on national television, doing exactly what we’re passionate about, is really a gift. They left it unscripted from the start, and I think people feel that. This is just our life!
I mean, honestly, I don’t think there’s anyone on television who’d pick up a dead cockroach off the floor and pop it into his mouth on camera. My husband is that guy. He has always been that guy—especially when fifty bucks is on the line. Come hang out with a bunch of his old college buddies sometime and listen to their “Chip stories,” and you’ll know for certain that the Chip you see on TV is the same Chip we all see at home. He just has a way of making things fun.
There are times at the end of a long day in front of the cameras when I just want to be done. It’s a lot of work to not only do our job but also keep our energy up and try to get what they need for the cameras. But Chip will extend our day even further by annoying the heck out of me—trying out bad jokes and performing silly antics while the cameras are rolling, just to keep it amusing.
If it wasn’t for him making me laugh, though, I might just work myself to death.
That’s another funny thing that’s changed since we moved to the farm: Jo seems to work twice as hard as I do now. She always has ten things going on. I used to be the one sort of juggling a million things at once, but now I’ve slowed down a little bit and she’s sped up. It’s interesting how roles can change like that.
I think that’s just part of what’s come along with the kids getting older too. Once they were in school, it became a whole lot easier to get work done outside the home. But being dedicated to our kids also meant we had to keep this TV show thing close to home. That meant setting some ground rules early on.
We carved out certain hours each day that we needed to set aside for family and business and insisted we would never travel more than thirty minutes outside of the Waco area for our renovation projects. We needed to be home for our kids, and their needs were going to come first as much as humanly possible.
We did try to be flexible, of course, knowing they were spending a lot of money to shoot this show and paying that whole professional crew who showed up in Waco with all of their equipment and trucks and union rules. So some compromise seemed in order. But we’ve still tried to stick to our ground rules as much as possible, even after the show took off and we knew it was a hit.
Honestly, we had no idea what we were in for.
No idea at all. The pilot alone earned big ratings when they aired it in May of 2013.
Everyone at the network got pretty excited.
But once the first episode of the series aired in April of 2014, the show just took off. I mean, took off like wildfire. Suddenly we were being recognized even when we left Waco. People were stopping us in stores and coming up to us at restaurants. I didn’t know so many people watched HGTV. And I couldn’t believe how many people had seen our show.
We still don’t own a TV, so the only way we knew when a show was on—if we didn’t go to a friend’s house to watch—was when our phones would blow up with texts of congratulations or when e-mails would begin streaming in from all over the country asking us to do remodels.
We started getting all sorts of interview requests, and folks were asking us to speak at their events or their churches. It was absolutely crazy. Overnight our lives were turned upside down.