Clint Harp parked in the driveway of an abandoned house, took a deep breath, and started crying. Just four months earlier, he had quit his lucrative job in medical sales in Houston and moved his wife, Kelly, and three kids to Waco, all to pursue his passion of making furniture. Now, with no solid leads, no business coming in, and almost no money left, he was ready to abandon it all. He hated himself for being so Pollyanna in the first place. Fighting through frustrated tears, he called his wife.
"This is bad. I need to go find a job," he remembers telling her. "I was making six figures in Houston, and now we're broke. I wasn't selling any furniture."
Kelly listened as he beat himself up, then told him exactly what they’d do: "We need to go get our kids and go to the park," Clint says. He was dumbstruck — how could she think of the playground at a time like this? "I told her that sounded crazy — but okay."
For 45 minutes, they played and laughed, and tried to see the world beyond their empty bank account. They left the park almost hopeful — until they started to drive home. The "empty" gas light flickered on.
"We’ll just get closer to maxing out our credit card," Clint remembered worrying. "We sat there, waiting for the tank to fill up, in complete silence."
Then he noticed a black truck pull up at the pump across from his. The logo on the car door said "Magnolia Homes."
"I just threw a Hail Mary," he recalls. "I just went up to the guy pumping gas and said, 'Hey, I'm a woodworker, and a few months back, I left a message for a guy named Chip. I don't even know if he's still over there at Magnolia, but I'd love to talk to you guys about doing some work.'"
The guy stared at him, and uttered two words that would change Clint's life forever: "I'm Chip."
That was the day Clint met Chip Gaines — owner of a local construction company, whose wife Joanna was an interior designer. It would be months before they'd become the Chip and Jo — the stars of HGTV’s insanely successful show Fixer Upper — and years before they would make "shiplap" a lifestyle, turning Waco, Texas, into a tourist destination for design obsessives everywhere.
For most people, this would be the moment of a lifetime. But it seems like Clint's lifetime has been full of those kind of moments — Hail Marys and fateful encounters — that have brought the 40-year-old to this exact spot. He's about to launch his own show, Wood Work — premiering on the DIY network Wednesday, May 9, at 10 p.m. EST — something he never imagined for himself. And while people are quick to say "it's all because you met Chip Gaines," it's really because he knows to take advantage of every opportunity, even if it means risking everything.
Now, with a memoir about to hit stores, all he wants to do is inspire people to hang on. "You never know what those things you’re going through are for, or what they’re leading you to," he says. "It may lead to something even more difficult that then becomes something great — I don’t know. I would never have even been at that gas station if it weren’t for all these other things in my life."
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Carve Out Your Own Place In The World.
Those 'other things' involve the half-dozen lives he lived before launching his furniture company, Harp Design Co. Somewhere between undergrad at Baylor University in Waco, and where he is now, he’d been a director of operations, a copier salesman, a youth minister, a church planter, and a missionary in Paris.
"I tried a whole bunch of different things; some worked out, some didn’t," Clint says. "After being married five years, Kelly and I decided it was time to have kids. I needed a more substantial job, so I called a friend who knew of an opening in medical sales. The job came with the promise of a six-figure salary and a 401K, and that was too much to pass up."
For four years, that was Clint's daily grind. And while he didn't love the job itself, he found he was naturally good at it. He was a people person — something he says he picked up from his father, who missed his own calling as a comedian. On the side, he’d practice the skills he’d learned from his grandfather, making furniture by hand. The more he did it, the more he loved it, and he just couldn’t shake the feeling that this was supposed to be something beyond a hobby.
So Clint and Kelly took the leap in 2011, moving to Waco to really focus on the family woodworking business. That's when a friend told Clint to call his pal Chip. He thought maybe he'd be interested in his stuff.
"I believe that wherever you can make connections, make connections, so I called him and left a message," Clint says. "He never called me back, which is no surprise, really. I probably sounded crazy, and he was really busy, even back then. The renovating, the designing, all of it — that’s really what they were doing for 10-plus years out in Waco. The cameras came along when they were already well into it."
The day Clint had hit rock bottom and ran into Chip at the gas station, the two hit it off so immediately that Chip invited him and Kelly over to have dinner at their farmhouse a few nights later. At the time, Joanna was running a successful business selling home accessories out of her house — but she wanted to expand into furniture. "Could you ever build me something?" she asked. Clint said yes — how could he turn down this chance? — but was concerned: He had the skills, but he didn’t have a workshop.
Trust Your Gut Feeling.
Clint had been building some stuff in his garage, but his set-up — including a worktable he'd built and a few tools his grandfather had given him — wasn't enough to boost a business. Also the orders hadn't been pouring in. So he spent most of his days volunteering at Habitat for Humanity. You could say the organization was in his blood: His grandmother, who worked at the Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta while Clint was growing up, grew close with former President Jimmy Carter and his family, who were passionate Habitat supporters.
"My grandmother’s the person I respect most in the world, so if she thought highly of somebody, I thought they were awesome," Clint says. His grandmother had passed away about 15 years before his move to Waco, but as he got ready to move, he felt a strange push from her. "I told Kelly, ‘I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m supposed to volunteer for Habitat when we move. It feels like my grandmother’s saying from the other side of the grave that I should do it.' I volunteered like it was my full-time job, Monday through Friday," he says.
So when he agreed to help Joanna out with some furniture, he knew he needed a legit place to work. He mentioned it to his friends at Habitat, and as fate would have it, they were closing their cabinet shop. They offered to rent their 1,600-square-foot space to him for $25 a month.
"I wouldn’t have gotten the shop if I hadn’t been volunteering there," he says. "When you see how all of these opportunities lined up, it’s a weird thing.”
Don't Do Anything For The Glory.
Once he had a workshop to call his own, Clint started regularly taking orders for Joanna’s business. Their lives were pretty quiet — until a production company came calling.
"These people want to produce a show with us and pitch it to HGTV," Joanna told him one day. She asked him if he’d be okay appearing in an episode. He was all in — and before he knew it, he was a regular on the home renovation show.
In the second season, he showed Jo how to make wooden candlesticks. The item quickly became a bestseller — still to this day — though his farmhouse tables are becoming a close second.
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As Fixer Upper became a ratings juggernaut, bringing in more than 2.1 million viewers an episode, Clint’s life hit warp speed. Orders went through the roof — and so did requests for him to speak at conferences and events.
"It was like throwing kerosene on a small fire," he says. "We’re a small business, and we’ve had to grow with the momentum of the show and try not to get kicked off this train."
Tour buses began circling Waco, passing his workshop and retail store on a near-hourly basis, and suddenly, he was getting stopped on the street. But while some design stars complain about the fame, Clint's psyched to have the chance to touch someone's life.
"I’m someone who’s always loved to talk to people, and now, there’s people who want to talk to me, and that’s great," he laughs. "I just hope the words I say add value to their life in some way — I really and truly hope that. God knows there’s enough negativity out there."
He’s bracing himself for life after starring in his own show, and he’s been warned things will only get more intense. To combat it, he’s gotten stricter about protecting his family time.
"At the latest, I’m home by 5:15, if not earlier, so I can be with my kids," he says. "If I’m gone over the weekend for work, I’ll take some days before or after to be with them. If I’m not careful, I could never shut off and go from one thing to the next — and the next thing I know — I haven’t seen my kids grow up."
That, above all else, is the one opportunity he won’t miss out on. If life’s taught him anything, it’s that you always make time for a trip to the park.
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