To this day that sign is one of my proudest accomplishments. I’m no Joanna Gaines, but I certainly see things differently and love design in my own unique way. That first sign really reflected that for me. I would glow when I would hear a customer come in the shop and say, “I saw the sign and just had to stop in.”
Finally, in October of 2005, the shop was ready to go. In a rush, I hand-painted a dinky little “Open” sign, but I ran out of space for the n, so it dropped down at the end. It was just bad. I didn’t have an advertising budget. I hadn’t done any marketing at all. We’d told plenty of people we knew, of course, and our parents had spread the word, but I was basically hoping that people would see my store when they were driving by and drop in. And yet I put out a sign on my opening day that looked like a four-year-old had drawn it. It was pathetic.
Inside, the shop was pretty much everything I wanted it to be. In addition to the home décor items, I had a section full of fresh flowers for sale. They smelled so good and looked perfect. When I was in New York, I had lived next to a little flower shop, and I’d loved watching people walk out with fresh flowers wrapped in kraft paper. I wanted to create that same feel in Waco, Texas that I had experienced in New York City.
So I had the flowers all ready to go. I had the candles burning. I had Frank Sinatra music playing. And at 9:55 a.m., just five minutes before the doors opened, I started to freak out.
She was hyperventilating. No joke. I thought I might have to take her to the emergency room or something, she was so nervous.
I just started panicking. “No one’s going to come. Why is no one here?”
Chip and I had done the math. I needed to make at least two hundred dollars a day in order to pay the mortgage and insurance and electricity. That was two hundred dollars every day we were open just to stay afloat, without any profits. I’d been working so hard getting everything ready that I hadn’t stopped to think about what might happen if the store didn’t make that much money. I was close to a complete nervous breakdown, thinking, What if this doesn’t work?
Then, just after ten o’clock, a Hummer pulled into the parking lot, followed by a Mercedes, followed by a Suburban and then a BMW. All these rich women showed up out of nowhere.
They were doctors’ and lawyers’ wives, stay-at-home moms and grandmothers who loved to shop and who did their best to make their homes feel nice. It turned out they’d all been watching my little shop come together during the renovations. They’d been eagerly anticipating my opening day for weeks, and it seemed that my idea of bringing a New York-style boutique experience to a home décor store wasn’t far-fetched at all. There were a lot of people in town who were excited for it.
My first day open we made $2,800.
By the way, my dad decided to sell his Firestone shop shortly after this. I went over and helped him clean out the attic one day, and guess what I found up there? The wicker sleigh that I’d fixed up nice with the garland and Christmas lights and put up for sale in his lobby was still there, tucked in a corner. I just shook my head. He bought it himself to give me a little boost of confidence as I got ready to open my store.
What can I say? It worked. And so did the shop.
Sometimes when something is meant to be, it’s meant to be. It had nothing to do with how I advertised, and it certainly didn’t have anything to do with my being some kind of an amazing designer or having a reputation, because I wasn’t any kind of a designer at all, and no one knew who I was. I just knew what I liked, and I trusted that other people might like it too. And I was where I was supposed to be. I’d listened to my own intuition and let God guide me toward the plans he’d had for me all along.
I mean, is there anyone who could possibly imagine that the way to get to your life’s calling would be to marry a guy who showed up an hour and a half late to your first date and then to let that man talk you into opening your own small business in the first year of marriage? But guess what? It all seemed to be working out in that perfectly messy way life works when you trust in God and his plans for your life rather than focusing on your own.
At that point, I wasn’t anywhere near used to the dynamics of it all. Chip’s impulsive buying of properties, the way I’d hate them at first and then come to love them, only to have to move out again, the unexpected twists and turns and the hardships we’d have to overcome to get ourselves back on course—all of that was still new to me. And as we repeated them over the next few years, moving from flip house to flip house and starting over again and again, there would be a whole lot of tears.
But the fact that we established that crazy pattern of doing things in our own unique way so early on in our marriage was important. It prepared us for everything that would come later on. And Chip’s decision to move us into that little white eight-hundred-square-foot house worked out exactly the way he said it would. It helped us to get ahead and start making some sustainable income.
One of the real pluses to that second house was it had a big side yard that we could subdivide, so we could build a whole second house to rent or to sell right next to the one we were living in. I bought that house, lot included, for $30,000, and we probably put $25,000 into it. So we were all-in for $55,000 on that little house, and it turned out beautiful—it really did. And we were able to build a brand-new house next door for about $130,000.
And of course this was all debt. We didn’t own anything outright. And getting the money to do all this hadn’t been easy. The banks hadn’t wanted to mess around with these little houses at first. They were either small potatoes, or the banks felt I needed to build a reputation first. The few they actually agreed to caused us to go scrambling every month just to make the payments and pay our own bills.
When it came to remodeling, we never took out any walls or did any major construction at that point. Everything was just cosmetic. But we tried to do things creatively and nice. We updated the kitchen with new appliances. We used the existing cabinets and learned to repaint them. We put in new countertops and a new backsplash when we could. We restored the hardwood floors, and I mean lots of them. Chip literally became an expert in setting tile and wood floor restoration. We took out the bathtub and replaced it with a nice, wide shower with multiple showerheads and some body jets. Honestly, it felt luxurious, like the kind of shower you’d find in a really upscale house or a spa somewhere. Then came the paint, and we were done. And by that point, as I’ve mentioned, I would be in love with the place.
But it wasn’t just the work we put in that made me love that tiny white house. It wasn’t even the easy vacuuming, though that was a plus. What made that house special was the incredible memories we made there.
We threw Chip’s thirtieth birthday party in that house’s little backyard. I strung Christmas lights in the trees, and Chip built a firepit that was unbelievable. We didn’t have much in the way of backyard furniture, so I put hay bales all around the perimeter for people to sit on. There was a little old weathered shed in the back, and I lit that up too.
It looked like something you’d see in a magazine. It was one of the best parties I’ve ever had in my life. It was funny because we were basically poor. We didn’t know how we were going to pay our bills at the end of the month, and we were living in this tiny house, and I invited all of these college buddies to my party who’d gone and started making real money. They came in from Dallas and Austin and parked their Beemers and their Range Rovers up on the lawn of this $30,000 property we owned.