Inside Chip And Joanna Gaines' Lives Before Their HGTV Fame

Before they were famous, "Fixer Upper" stars Joanna and Chip Gaines possessed the ambition that would help them create a thriving entertainment and lifestyle brand. Their marriage has helped them sell their wares, as it's one fans find aspirational; the dynamic duo has worked together for years building their businesses.

The HGTV talents both overcame obstacles growing up. Joanna has spoken about how she struggled with being bullied during her childhood, telling People that kids would crack racist jokes about her because she's half Korean. As for Chip, he told Money he couldn't read when he started first grade. However, while compensating for this lack, he gained some valuable life skills. "I became a BS-er," he said. "I became a salesman, a smooth talker. ... I'd get called on to read certain things, and on the fly, I'd come up with the most wittiest circumstances as to why I couldn't do that."

The duo have come a long way from being the kids in class who got bullied and couldn't read. Joanna and Chip have made Waco, Texas, their home base, where they own and operate the Magnolia Market shopping destination. They also have their own restaurant, television network, and home goods line. However, they haven't always found their success fulfilling — Chip has even expressed sadness over his "Fixer Upper" fame. So, let's rewind back to simpler times before he and Joanna had so much on their stylishly scalloped plates.

It's probably not hard for fans to imagine Chip Gaines taking a baseball bat to drywall to elicit an eye-roll from an exasperated Joanna Gaines on "Fixer Upper." However, some viewers might not know that he once dreamed of being on the baseball team at Baylor University in Waco. While playing second base at North Lake Junior College in Irving, Texas, he got scouted by Baylor's coach at the time and thought he was on his way to achieving his goal — but the coach retired after Chip decided to transfer to Baylor. This dashed his dream. "After baseball went away, it took me about a year to get my head back on straight," he told Baylor Magazine.

While attending Baylor, Chip got a job with the school's grounds crew and later launched his own lawn care company. So, at least he achieved one objective. "I wanted to be known as a businessman," he told Waco's Magazine.

Joanna is another Baylor alum, but she didn't meet Chip until after they graduated. She obtained her degree in communications in 2001, while Chip is a 1998 grad who majored in business administration. Joanna's original career goal was to become a broadcast journalist, and she even spent some time interning in NYC for the CBS crime documentary series "48 Hours." This is when she decided that covering the news wasn't for her. "My job as an intern was to read the papers to find salacious stories, cold cases, or horrible crime stories ... It was heavy," she explains in her memoir, "The Magnolia Story."

Before Joanna Gaines enrolled at Baylor, she took business classes at a nearby community college. She aimed was to someday take over her father's Waco business, a Firestone auto shop. She also appeared in commercials for the company, which originally sparked her interest in a television career. "Even though I'm naturally a shy, introverted person, there's something about the camera that I enjoy," she told Baylor Magazine. She definitely left an impression on Chip Gaines in those local TV spots.

After her internship in New York ended, Joanna returned to Waco and started helping at her father's shop. Chip was a repeat customer there who had seen the ads, and a family photo Joanna's dad had placed where customers could see it. "I knew I'd marry her one day just by the picture on the wall," Chip told PopSugar.

Chip got the chance to make his move when he needed his brakes checked. Joanna was working the day he came in and dropped this suave line on her: "Hey, you're the girl from the commercials." While it earned him a date, he soon discovered it would take more than recognizing Joanna from TV to impress her.

Chip Gaines almost blew his first date with Joanna Gaines before it started by showing up to pick her up an hour and a half late. She was waiting with her friends and recalls telling them, "I don't want to go anywhere with this idiot," in "The Magnolia Story." However, they welcomed him into their apartment. According to Joanna, Chip offered no apology for his tardiness and spent most of their date yammering nonstop about himself. "I was wondering if he was just a bit crazy," she wrote in the Magnolia Journal.

Despite her reservations about doing so, Joanna agreed to a second date. However, she had to postpone it to undergo spine surgery. "Then he didn't call me again. He didn't send flowers to the hospital. Nothing," she writes in her book. Chip ghosted Joanna for months, and she later learned that he and a friend had made a bet to see who could go the longest without talking to the women they were seeing. For Chip, hurting Joanna's feelings was worth winning $50.

Chip's immaturity reared its head again after the couple had been dating for a while. Chip decided to jet off to Mexico, leaving Joanna in charge of his multiple businesses. However, he didn't leave her with enough money to pay his subcontractors. In his book "Capital Gaines: Smart Things I Learned Doing Stupid Stuff," he recalls Joanna telling him, "Lucky for you, your dad is bailing your sorry butt out." She also threatened to dump him if he didn't return home ASAP, which he did.

After spending time at Baylor hustling hard, Chip Gaines purchased his first property using the money he made from his lawncare business and a laundry service he had created for his fellow students. "I made $30,000 on the first house flip that I ever did," he told Baylor Magazine. Realizing the profit potential for flipping houses was higher than for his other businesses, he was hooked.

In Magnolia Journal, Joanna Gaines recalled Chip chatting about his new endeavor during their first date. After the couple married in 2003, he enlisted her help making his rundown purchases look more inviting, and the couple opened their renovation business, Magnolia Homes, in 2006. "Chip would often surprise me with our next project, with a sort of blind optimism that I might be equally excited for this grand new adventure he'd embarked us on," Joanna wrote. However, she sometimes found it difficult to share his enthusiasm when she saw some of his acquisitions. "I would buy these houses and she would just throw a temper tantrum," Chip recalled on "The Kelly Clarkson Show."

But the experience wasn't all bad. Although Joanna had no previous interior design experience, she discovered that she enjoyed it — and her perspective on Chip's fixer uppers changed. "In time, I found that I actually enjoyed the challenge of proving my first impressions wrong," she wrote in Magnolia Journal.

While some couples are frugal during their first year of marriage, Joanna Gaines and Chip Gaines were willing to take financial risks. The newlyweds told Texas Monthly that they purchased a small building for $5,000 that would become the first iteration of Magnolia Market, a quaint boutique with no towering silos looming over it. Explaining the origin of the store's name, Chip told Glamour, "When we were just dating, I would pick these blooms from Magnolia trees."

While it might seem like they got Magnolia Market's first home for a steal, spending that kind of cash was a big deal for the couple. "The only money we had was what was in Chip's pocket. ... If I needed to go grocery shopping it's whatever was in his pocket," Joanna told People. "That's how we paid the bills." Chip and Joanna didn't buy a TV at the advice of a marriage counselor, so that's one way they saved a little dough. 

In addition to working at her new home décor store, Joanna was still helping Chip flip houses. In "The Magnolia Story," Chip recalls how his wife coped with the stress. "She cried. ... That was sort of her thing during year one," he writes. Working alongside a spouse also took some adjusting for Chip, who told PopSugar, "I was single through my 20s, self-employed, and strong-willed. It took me a while to learn to say, 'Yes, ma'am.'"

The first home Joanna Gaines and Chip Gaines lived in after getting hitched needed a major facelift. While Chip might be a glass-half-full kind of guy, this is something that even he couldn't deny. "It was a yellow ranch-style house — about 1,200 square feet or so. We were so excited to be moving into our first home together, but honestly, the place was a complete mess," he told Apartment Therapy. 

According to Joanna, it was also in desperate need of being deodorized. On "The Kelly Clarkson Show," she explained why the property was so pungent. "College athletes had lived in the house that semester before," she said. "So it was June in Texas heat, if you can imagine, and they had had all these indoor pets." However, she and Chip were so determined to see the project through that they spent their nights sleeping on the floor (hopefully after giving it a deep cleaning).

The experience was so horrible that it made Joanna cry. When she made the home one of her earliest interior design experiments, the results weren't HGTV-worthy. While trying to find her design aesthetic, she decorated the house into a hodgepodge of clashing styles. Instead of a modern farmhouse, it was a nautical ranch cabin with maybe a dash of Rococo. "The front room had sailboats in it, the kitchen was mustard yellow and French themed, and the back den was rustic with cedar paneled walls, hanging horns, and cow hides," she told HGTV.

It's a good thing Chip Gaines and Joanna Gaines eventually moved to a sprawling farm outside of town. The city of Waco probably wouldn't love them nearly as much these days if they were allowing their menagerie of animals — which include goats, chickens, cats, and dogs — to have free rein of the suburban neighborhood they used to call home. While they were still living in the city, the couple owned just three dogs, but the canines became a nuisance to their neighbors when the Gaineses left them outside to roam wherever they pleased. This resulted in several visits from animal control — and a pile of citations. "They came with heavy fines, which I absolutely refused to pay out of some misguided form of principle," Chip writes in "The Magnolia Story." Eventually, the couple owed the city so much money ($2,500, to be exact) that the cops showed up at their house one day to arrest Joanna, whose name was on the tickets. Luckily, Chip was able to buy a little time by saying that she wasn't there. 

When the couple later showed up at what they thought was an appointment to pay their fines, Chip had Joanna's name replaced with his on the citations — so it was he who got handcuffed. "The whole thing was just a sting to get us to come down there and be arrested," Joanna recalled. She then had to scrape together $800 to bail him out.

The couple experienced some canine karma after moving to their farm. They told Waco's Magazine that a close canine cousin of the domestic dog, the coyote, keeps them up at night by howling and harassing their goats.

Chip Gaines and Joanna Gaines welcomed their first child in 2005. On "The Tonight Show," Joanna revealed that she and Chip decided to name their son after where they spent their honeymoon: The Drake Hotel in New York. To hear Joanna tell it, Chip struggled to adapt to the responsibilities of being a parent.

Joanna told People that she left Chip in charge of watching Drake one day while she went jogging. She expected Chip to take Drake to the grocery store with him, but upon her return, the horrified mom realized Chip had left the infant home. Chip explained that he had forgotten Drake was in the house with him. "'Chip!' I yelled, totally freaked out," Joanna recalled. "I was a first-time mom. Can you imagine?" The next time Chip was given a chance to prove he was capable of caring for a baby on his own, she caught him in the act of leaving the house without Drake again.

Strike three for Chip came when Joanna returned home and discovered her husband driving around on his four-wheeler with Drake strapped in front of him. Per Money, Chip crashed the ATV in a solo accident not long afterward, and Drake started joining his mom at work every day. "I was either wearing him on me or he was sleeping in the pack n play behind the counter," Joanna wrote on Facebook.

If Joanna Gaines had been born a bit later, maybe the mother of five would have become a tradwife influencer. TikTok would have provided her with the perfect outlet for her creativity when she shut down her Magnolia Market boutique in 2006. She was pregnant with her second child and felt that a higher power was encouraging her to be a stay-at-home mom. "I wrestled with that because I felt like it was letting go of our dream. ... But I felt like God said, 'Hey, this is the season to be home, and you need to trust me,'" she recalled to Waco's Magazine. However, Joanna didn't stop working for long — instead, she shifted her focus to her and her husband's house-flipping business.

While Joanna and Chip Gaines' religious views have sparked controversy, Joanna has said that her faith has always been a guiding force in her life. "My relationship with God, it's like no one else's," she said to Oprah Winfrey on "Oprah's Super Soul," adding that she believes God often speaks to her. She also told Waco's Magazine that she was right to trust the voice that told her to close her store, based on the success that later came her way.

Joanna Gaines discovered her signature rustic yet refined design style right before she started one of her biggest projects. In a post on her blog (via Homes & Gardens), she revealed that inspiration struck while driving through New Mexico in 2011. "I saw farmland and silos — the lush green fields combined with the industrial galvanized cylinders, and chippy white paint spoke to me," Joanna wrote. A year later, Joanna and Chip Gaines had completed work on a home where she thought they would put down roots, but then Chip showed her a farmhouse that had promise but needed a lot of TLC. It also came with 40 acres of land.

In addition to the farmhouse's future upkeep and the money that would have to go into it to make it habitable, there was the purchasing price to consider. "I really believed we could not afford an investment of this magnitude," Joanna wrote in the Magnolia Journal. "I was running the books for our business, and I knew money was tight." However, she and Chip fell in love with the setting and decided to make the farmhouse their ninth home. It seems they've adapted to farm living well, with Joanna telling Waco's Magazine, "When you have that many tomatoes you have to pick, it's like a full-time job. ... And it's the same with the chickens. Every day now you come in with 30 eggs."

In 2012, Joanna Gaines was featured in a profile by Design Mom. Katie Neff, a production exec working on home reno shows, saw the post and was intrigued. However, when she contacted Joanna, Chip Gaines was suspicious. On "Today," Joanna recalled Chip telling her, "Do not call that person back. It's a scam." She likened his reaction to the end of "Dumb and Dumber."

However, the couple ultimately agreed to shoot a sizzle reel with a crew from Neff's production company. "I didn't know this, but I had an actual phobia of cameras," said Chip. He attempted to avoid being in front of them, which left a frustrated Joanna trying to make compelling television on her own. It was a complete disaster until Chip made a disastrous purchase; he decided to surprise Joanna with a dilapidated houseboat that he hadn't yet seen in person. "And I was mad," Joanna recalled. It was in such bad shape that it wasn't even capable of floating.

The drama the boat purchase generated turned out to be entertainment gold. Chip recalled feeling defeated and upset over the ordeal until one of the cameramen told him, "Bro, if we do our job, you just landed yourself a reality television show." And that's the crazy way Joanna and Chip became the stars of "Fixer Upper."