As the hit HGTV show “Fixer Upper” came to an end last night, many fans are still wondering: What made Chip and Jo decide to end the show?
In his new book, “Capital Gaines: Smart Things I Learned Doing Stupid Stuff,” Chip Gaines recalls a tweet he received at 2 AM from a customer that “changed everything.”
The tweet read, “Hey @chippergaines, it’s been 3 weeks, and I still haven’t gotten my wreath. What’s up?!”
Gaines writes in his book, “I tried to shake it off, knowing that I couldn’t do anything about it then and that it would have to wait until morning. No luck. I was up all night dwelling on it.”
Chip couldn’t get the customer’s tweet off of his mind. After a restless night, Chip was on set with his wife, Joanna Gaines, filming “Fixer Upper,” but his mind was consumed by one thought: “What am I doing here?”
“Who else but me should be figuring out what was ailing my growing business, and who else other than me should be ensuring that we moved beyond each and every one of these mistakes?” he explains in his book, “Capital Gains.”
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Itching to walk off the set so he could fix the customer’s problem right away, Gaines had an epiphany.
“Something shifted within me. Suddenly filming the TV show looked like ‘the job’ that had seduced me into giving it my precious time that I had always promised would be reserved for my true loves, my family and my business. How had this side gig found its way to competing with the very things that mean more to me than anything else in the world?”
The couple quickly realized that they were overbooked and overtired.
“These major responsibilities affect my ability to sleep, and they steal from my peace of mind,” Gaines writes. “Each is important. Each is worthwhile. And each is something that that can’t succeed without Joanna’s and my personal involvement.”
Although the couple is famous for their show, their business, Magnolia, had been their passion for over ten years, long before HGTV found them. The couple eventually opened Magnolia Market, the hub for their furniture and home goods housed in two-grain silos in Waco, Texas.
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Gains writes, “These past several years have been such a mind-blowing season of life for us. They have also been a real struggle. I’ve been in this lengthy internal wrestling match, trying to understand and prioritize these three main priorities while also fending off all the other big things that compete for my time. Who deserves the best of me? Which ones get the bulk of my passion and energy? And which, in turn, gets what amounts to my leftovers?”
Gaines puts an emphasis on the importance of his marriage and his children in his life, stating they always take first place. He also said he “dream[s] of the day Jo and I are chairmen of the board and not actually involved in the day-to-day operations,” so they can spend more time as a family.
Gaines adds, “It was really easy for us to feel like we could do it all when the show and the business were in the early stages. But the bigger things got — and they got big fast— the less energy we had to devote to all three. So much time was being allocated to filming that the details of the business were slipping.”
When the couple announced they would be ending their hit TV show, there was instant speculation over the Gaines marriage. People immediately jumped to conclusions that that was the reason they were ending the show.
Gaines writes that their relationship is stronger than ever, “but pure long-term exhaustion can change a person — or two persons. We had been driving so hard for so long now. And I had this sense that if I kept my foot on the gas, we might be headed for disaster.”
(H/T Business Insider)