The whole idea that even a small rock can start an avalanche was certainly playing out here. Villas were popping up like crazy. The lots were selling, and contracts were coming in steadily now after all that exposure in the local paper. Things were really rolling. So months after we’d started going to Peggy’s farm fairly frequently, Chip finally got the nerve to ask her son what the asking price for the property might be.
He said without hesitation that he hoped it would go for around half a million dollars—half a million that we didn’t have and couldn’t even hope to borrow. Because of what had happened with the Villas, our credit was all tapped out. We would be lucky to get a loan on half that much. We couldn’t even get new loans for flips or renovations. The glory days of using bank money to finance our dreams seemed to be over. Even with things flying over at the Villas, the banks needed more proof that they weren’t going to end up stalling out.
Still, we fell so in love with that land—not to mention the idea of what I could turn that house into—that we didn’t want to let go. Chip kept talking to the attorney, who really acted a bit like a confidant or an advisor in that season. We decided to put our Carriage Square house on the market, just in case there was an off chance we could make this work. We figured that with all of the renovations I’d done we would be able to turn a nice profit, and maybe that would give us enough of a down payment to get a loan. If we could get the attorney and his mother to lower the asking price on the farm, we just might be able to make the deal work.
We worked out all the numbers and came to a pretty depressing conclusion. Even if we got our full asking price for the Carriage Square house, we’d still be well under the asking price they hoped for.
The thing is, we’d actually grown pretty close to our attorney friend and his beautiful mother through all of those visits and talks. We learned that he was about our parents’ age and he loved that farm and had all sorts of fond memories of his dad there. The farm was called Covey Rise Ranch—named after a covey of quail. His dad had raised quail dogs on that property—gorgeous bird dogs that he and his dad had spent hours working in those fields.
Chip finally got the nerve to make them an offer, which they promptly turned down. But they did say they weren’t in a hurry and if anything changed for us financially we should definitely reapproach them.
Peggy left the farm and moved into her villa, and she loved it. It was the perfect size, the perfect layout, and she loved the location. She just could not rave enough about that house. We were happy for her. But even as more offers came in for the sale of the villas, we weren’t close enough to paying off our debt or making enough money to allow us to make a better offer on her property for ourselves.
We continued to visit the property pretty often. The kids loved it. We loved it. We just wanted to hold on to our enjoyment of it as long as we could. And one week we were actually sitting on a bench on the front porch of that old farmhouse, with the kids running around the yard, when Chip got a call on his cell phone.
“Yeah. Yes. Tell them we accept,” I heard him say.
When he hung up the phone, he told me, “We just got an offer on the house. It’s a good offer. A really good offer. I said we’d take it.”
And here’s where things just get crazy. Jo and I believe in miracles, but when we hear stories like this we usually go, “Yeah right. Like that happened!” But as sure as I’m sitting here writing this, my phone rang less than ten minutes later. It was Peggy’s son.
This intelligent, tough lawyer said, “Chip, you know what? I’ve been thinking about that offer, and I don’t know. My mom is happy over in the Villas. You guys did her right with that house.” He spoke as if we’d done her this great big favor by building her a nice home, when in fact they’d been the ones who’d trusted us that the Villas were going to be great.
“So, if you really want the farm, you’ve got yourself a deal. I’ll give it to you for the amount you mentioned before. I can see you and your family loving it out there.” Little did he know that “out there” was where we were sitting at that very moment!
“Oh, wow! That’s fantastic,” Chip said, standing right up with the biggest smile on his face. I got tears in my eyes just seeing Chip’s expression. I stood up, and he gave me a great big hug with that phone still to his ear.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Uh-huh. Wow. You’re kidding! I don’t even know what to say. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
I got off the phone and said, “Jo, you’re not going to believe this. Not only is he going to sell us this place, but he’s wanting to owner-finance it. He said he would actually prefer a little interest on the money, and he felt like this was the best deal for now, and we could finance him out in a couple years when the Villas were closer to being completed.’
Jo said, “What?” At this point we were literally in shock. The kids even noticed that something was going on and came running over to see what was happening.
“Kids,” I said, as Drake, Ella, Duke, and little Emmie all gathered around us. “How would you like it if the farm was our home?”
“Yeah!” they all screamed. They started running around hooting and hollering.
I simply couldn’t believe it. It was far beyond anything I’d ever imagined could actually happen in my life.
“Chip,” I said. “We’re buying a farm.”
FOURTEEN
HEEDING THE CALL
Before we signed papers on the sale of our Carriage Square home, and just before we passed papers to buy Peggy’s farm, my phone rang. On the other end of the line was the woman from a television production company who had the crazy idea to put Chip and me on TV.
It was two weeks later that the camera crew arrived, a few days after that when the houseboat arrived that Chip “surprised” me with and the top guy on the crew told us, “If I do my job, you two just landed yourself a reality TV show.”
It was 2012 by the time an even bigger camera crew came back to film a full pilot episode of Fixer Upper for HGTV, and it wouldn’t be until 2013 that the show would get picked up.
But we never stopped. We never slowed down. Our family just kept pushing, finding our way through. We didn’t know if the TV show would ever really get off the ground. So we just kept working at making the most of our lives, despite a seemingly never-ending spate of financial obstacles.
Since the houseboat wasn’t a livable option, my parents let us move into their house. They had actually bought a place in Castle Heights but later decided to move. Though they’d recently put the house on the market, it hadn’t yet sold. So they said, “Hey, we know you’re working on the farm. Why don’t you just live in our house for a while? We don’t have to sell it tomorrow.”
The timing worked out great, and we were so thankful. It worked out well for the pilot episode, too, since we were right in the middle of renovating the farm, and that made for some good TV. It showed how we were starting over, starting fresh, turning something that was outdated into the home of our dreams, just like we do for our clients.
We loved being outside so much at the farm that the first thing Jo had me build was the big outdoor fireplace. We built the whole thing out of antique bricks we had found. She also got started on a garden. The house became the secondary concern. Every time we got some cash together and went out there to do some remodeling, we always ended up doing another project outside. I guess subconsciously we decided we’d just take it slow and do what we could when we could, which was definitely a change of pace from our normal routine.