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  We didn’t know each other at all, but somehow, that afternoon, we ended up driving around Waco for three hours just talking. He showed me some projects he and his wife were working on. I told him about quitting my job. He told me about their new development. I explained I was volunteering with Habitat for Humanity. He said that they had four kids. At the time, we had two. He built houses. I wanted to build furniture. On top of being an interior designer, his wife had been selling the home goods she curated to anyone who’d buy them, and she was hoping to add a furniture line. Kelly was pursuing her master’s but had previously designed baby clothes and home goods and had a great eye for home décor. They didn’t quite know where their lives were headed. Neither did we.

  Chip suggested that our family come over for dinner, and a few nights later, we did. We knocked on their door and sat down together for a spaghetti meal while our kids ate and played in the back. Around that table, the four of us just dreamed aloud together, and throughout the evening, Chip popped in with, “You know, I feel like there could be something more here.” More sounded good, more of anything. More food? Yes, please. More conversation, more time, more planning? Absolutely.

  That evening, Joanna asked me, “Clint, do you think if I drew up some designs on a piece of paper, you could possibly build them?”

  I had no shop. I had no lumber. I had some tools, but they were in storage. I’d built a few tables and one bed, for which I’d earned zero dollars. I had a lathe, but didn’t know how to use it—not yet, anyway. I really had little to offer.

  “You bet, Jo,” I told her. “I’m all in.”

  It would’ve been completely understandable for Kelly to shoot me a glance that meant “Say no, Clint! This girl clearly knows what she’s doing and you definitely do not!” But Kelly didn’t say a word. From across the table, she just looked at me like “Yeah, do it. I know you can.”

  I still can’t believe I bumped into Chip, a guy who had no idea he was about to get his own TV show in less than a year from that day at the gas station. Some might call it providence, luck, serendipity, or even destiny. I’m not quite sure what to call it, but I do know this: what followed was as much a beginning as it was another step in the wild ride I’d been on for decades. And yet as extraordinary as this new chapter would ultimately be—eventually leading to our little startup, Harp Design Co., becoming known across the country through the hit HGTV show Fixer Upper—for me, the real story is all that came before. And that story starts with a bucktoothed kid from Atlanta who didn’t think he was headed anyplace special. Sometimes life has to fall to pieces for the journey ahead to become incredibly clear.

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  Splintered

  By the time I begin a project, I’ve already dreamed about the finished product enough. It’s now time to start making that dream a reality. One step is all that matters. Where that step leads is not for you to worry about. One step, one day, one board, one nail, one drop of sweat. When I drown out all the other noise and find this rhythm, things start to happen. If you can do this, you’ll find yourself in your moment, ready to craft something that will last, in some form, forever.

  Just off the banks of the Chattahoochee River, right outside of Atlanta, sits another house. It’s the home that my grandfather Verner Martin built. We called it the Buzzard’s Roost, or, for short, simply the Roost. During my early childhood, the Roost was my favorite place in the world. I did a lot of growing up there. It was a kid’s paradise, complete with a pool, peacocks roaming the yard, and plenty of land for make-believe adventures. Off the kitchen sat a nine-foot yellow pine table my grandfather built with his crew when they constructed the home. We always ate around that table, looking out on the Chattahoochee through the bay window at one end.

  It was at the Roost that the curtain goes up on my memory. I was three and a half. There I sat, at the top of my granddad’s stairs, waiting for my mom to marry my stepdad in the living room below. I was the ring bearer and wore a white suit and rust-orange tie, with my hair feathered to the right. My sister Bonnie, then six and the wedding’s flower girl, sat next to me in a flowing white dress, her body covered in chicken pox. She held a doll, which she clutched tight. I played with a toy airplane, proudly showing it to my uncle David and aunt Suzanne, who had just started her decades-long run as a flight attendant for Delta Airlines. For the longest time, I had thought my aunt gave me that toy plane. But years down the road, I would learn that my airplane and Bonnie’s doll had been a peace offering from our stepdad-to-be.

  The night before the ceremony, we’d stayed at his apartment. Mom wasn’t with us. She tells me now that he gave us those toys as a way to ease the coming transition. In the cool indie movie of my life that plays in my head, I like to imagine my sister and me saying, “All right, let’s cut the crap, Jim. We barely know each other, and we’re probably not ready to do this. But let’s buckle down and figure it out, okay?” We’d then grudgingly accept his presents, eat a snack, and maybe stare, in awkward silence, around at his seventies-themed apartment. What really happened is that we took those gifts and loved them, with no idea of all that was to follow.

  I can still see myself at the top of those stairs, holding that plane. I remember what the metal felt like in my hand. I remember wanting to fly. I remember that I held on to that little plane for the rest of that day and for years to come. I’ve since wondered what must’ve been going through the heads of my aunt and uncle as they waited there with us. Maybe they were reflecting on our family’s history, with all its twists and turns. Or maybe they were thinking how much our mother and father loved us and wanted the best for us, even if their best didn’t always turn out as expected.

  * * *

  My biological parents, Trish and Barry, split up when I was three and my sister Bonnie was six. I’ve never looked into the details really, probably because I didn’t truly want to know. They couldn’t make it work, and that was that. Soon after their divorce, both remarried, and Bonnie and I lived with our mom and new stepdad, Jim. A few months after the wedding, he got a job in Asheville, North Carolina, so the four of us left Atlanta and moved there.

  Every other weekend and for the next eight years, Bonnie and I were loaded into the back seat of our car so my mom and stepdad could drive about two hours to the halfway point between Asheville and Atlanta—a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Clayton, Georgia. There, my stepdad would pull into one side of the lot and park. Mom would then hug and kiss us good-bye, hand us our bags, and send us off to walk about thirty yards across the lot to where my dad and stepmom, Linda, waited. It was your basic prisoner exchange. Bonnie was usually crying. She hated the send-offs.

  For me, they were an early lesson in coping and emotional survival. Year after year and through trial and error, I figured out how to take the edge off a tense situation, how to smooth and rearrange the unhinged pieces of my life. My dad likes it when I call my stepdad “Jim” instead of “Dad.” My mom wants to feel like I always have a better time at home in Asheville than at my father’s place in Atlanta. Get those things right, and you’ll be okay. Whether my assessments were right or wrong, that’s how I managed the uncertainty, the stress, and the anxiety that followed my parents’ breakup. I set up an emotional swap meet that involved saying exactly what I needed to say to keep things calm. I got really good at quickly sizing up others and taking their emotional temperature. What makes that person explode? Noted. What makes him laugh? What makes her smile? Okay. Do that again. I learned to make friends and make peace and make a rough road smooth, and by age six, I was pretty well versed in it. So good, in fact, that later in life, I’d be hired by a company in Houston to do that very thing.

  Despite the twice-monthly weekend shuffle, I settled into life in Asheville. The town, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, was magical in the fall, when the changing leaves blanketed the hills above it. I attended Haw Creek Elementary and played baseball at the East Asheville Ballpark. School, sports, hanging with friends, and Su
nday church filled my days. I was the ultimate uncool kid: skinny, with protruding front teeth and an enormous head. Years later, a friend joked that I looked like a watermelon on a toothpick. I wore secondhand clothes, including a pair of tight red sweatpants that made my butt look even bigger than it already was. Though my family never missed a meal thanks to the relentless efforts of my stepdad, I knew we looked poor. Sounded poor. Dressed poor. Drove broken-down cars that often left us hoping for a miracle on the roadside. And we didn’t own any of the homes we lived in like my friends did. Ever.

  With things always so tight, Mom’s parents would give us some extra cash whenever we visited Atlanta. But back home in Asheville, we were on our own. I’m sure my mother’s parents figured she needed to make her own way in the world. Her father, the trailblazing builder that he was, had done it, and he required no less of his children. My own father, who worked in the finance department for Georgia Power, sent $250 a month in child support. Yeah, it wasn’t much for two kids, but it’s what he had and what he and my mom had agreed to.

  Money or no money, poor or not, there’s one reality that pretty much sums up my childhood: moving. The position my stepdad relocated for didn’t work out, so from then on, he did any odd job he could, from selling carpets, to being the guy that essentially pushed the play button on a VCR to make sure a local UHF channel’s shows kept playing, to working as a church facilities manager, in order to make ends meet. Really and truly, he worked his butt off. Mom’s job, other than a handful of short-lived part-time gigs, was tending to Bonnie and me, and years later, to the two children she and Jim had: my sister Suzanne, who is seven years younger than me, and my brother, Ben, who is fifteen years my junior. And then even farther down the road in 2005, welcoming an adopted child to our family, Miracle. But regardless of how hard they worked, there was no stopping the seemingly never-ending game of musical houses.

  During our eight years in Asheville, we moved eight times. We’d move around the corner or down the street or just about anywhere a landlord would take us. While there were plenty of other kids in my school whose families had as little money as we did, it seemed like most of them had what we lacked: stability. “You’ve lived in one house your whole life?” I once asked a classmate incredulously. As a child who relocated at least once a year and was shuttled across state lines twice a month, that blew me away.

  But you know what? Moving was a freakin’ blast. And you know why? Because my mom made it that way. She could figure out how to turn even the worst situation into an insanely good time filled with more laughter than you could stand. If there wasn’t enough money to buy us new school clothes, she’d make a trip to the Goodwill feel like a carnival. If you moved houses with my mom, you’d have thought digging through dumpsters for packing boxes was the only way to do it. She was always laughing, always forging ahead.

  Passionate, emotional, dramatic, kind, and caring—that’s my mom. If some people wear their emotions on their sleeves, she coordinates a whole outfit. She’ll give the shirt off her back to help a stranger and wants nothing more than to bond with anyone in her path. And, like I’ve said, the woman can laugh. I’ve never known a day where she hasn’t, at some point, doubled over in hysterical laughter.

  As the only daughter in her family, she worshiped her older brother, Howard, and adored her younger brothers, David and Dean. Her mother, Ann Callaway Martin, a charming and smart Southern lady with the most beautiful eyes, was brilliant with a quiet inner strength. She was my mother’s North Star. And yet what Mom craved most was the attention and affection of her father, which, to be fair, wasn’t the easiest thing for a man who had gone through the things he had to give. He probably felt like he gave enough in the form of a beautiful house in a great area and food on the table at all times. But my mom craved more from the leading man in her life, and never really received it, so just out of high school, she eloped with a guy she hardly knew and began living a nightmare she initially kept to herself. Nine months into the marriage, she shocked her parents with a revelation: “Mom, Dad, he’s beating me.”

  Now, my granddad was by no means a perfect father, but I dare you to mess with that man’s family. Though he didn’t always show it, he cared deeply. No one knew exactly how my grandfather intervened, but he did. Let’s just say the marriage was quickly annulled, and no one heard from the guy again. Mom enrolled in college, completed a two-year degree, and tried to get her life back on track.

  My grandmother, proud of her daughter’s progress, nudged her forward.

  “Honey,” she said to her one evening, “I dare you to go to the singles event this weekend at church.”

  “I don’t know,” my mother said. “It’s just not time yet.”

  “Trisha, do it,” she insisted. “Just go.”

  Mom went. And that was the day Patricia Ann Martin met a man named Barry Kenneth Harp—my father.

  My dad is something. He was the eldest of three, with his two sisters, my loving aunts Malinda and Donna Lee, trailing close behind. A disciple of Jackie Gleason and Johnny Carson, he can’t help but crack a joke. His dad, my granddad Donald, was the same way. Like Granddad Donald, my father lit up every room he stood in, including that church hall where he first noticed my mother, with her beautiful eyes, flowing black hair, and olive-toned skin.

  Dad was in the air force, and by the time he met my mother, he had finished stints in Thailand and Maine. Out of high school, he’d attended a couple of community colleges but hadn’t been too sure what he wanted to do with his life. After he’d stumbled through a few courses, his draft number was called. Had he not been enrolled as a student, he would’ve been sent to Vietnam, right at the height of the conflict, as an army man—which would’ve forever changed his trajectory. But thankfully, he didn’t have to go. Then, at twenty-one, he entered military service by his own choice. He signed up with the air force and spent time in basic training in San Antonio, Missouri, Oklahoma, and New Hampshire before being shipped off for about a year in Thailand. As a security officer, he protected the gate to the base until, in October 1969, President Nixon started calling troops home. My dad fortunately got to relocate to Maine—because two weeks after he’d gone, his base in Thailand was attacked.

  With a broad smile, a square jaw, and an uncanny resemblance to Prince Charles, my dad to this day talks about his time in Maine and his stint in the service as if he just returned. He remembers it so vividly. He’d married a woman in Maine, but when things didn’t work out between them, they divorced and he returned to his hometown of Atlanta. Two months following the divorce, my dad’s friend invited him to a singles event at his church. And there was my mom.

  After meeting at that church party, my parents’ connection was instantaneous. The two became inseparable as their feelings for each other grew. My mother recounts my dad, who was not quite the romantic, doing his best to explain his love for her by saying, “ ‘I love my mom, my sisters, and you—in that order . . .’ ” Well, at least he was clear, and apparently it was enough to capture her heart. Soon after that, they married.

  A mother’s dare and a friend’s invitation—that’s why I’m sitting here. My mom tells me now that when she met my dad at the singles event that evening, she’d needed to laugh, and he had cracked her up. They both needed to feel loved and found it in each other. But six years into their marriage, the shared laughter was replaced with arguments, the humor and love with disdain. My mother called it quits. Though they’re at peace now, the anger and hurt between them would last for years and create scars that would never go away. Yet out of all of it, two things were created that neither regretted. My sister Bonnie. And me.

  * * *

  During visits with my dad in Atlanta, I slept on the living room couch; Bonnie shared a room with our new stepsister, Becky, who was about seven years older than me. I was allowed to sleep on Becky’s waterbed once. I wet it. Back to the couch.

  My dad, an avid Georgia Bulldogs fan, loved sports. On the weekends when I was in
town, we played baseball, football, and basketball till he was probably ready to collapse. And then there was tennis. Some of my best memories are of Dad taking me to the courts down the street from his house. There, he patiently taught me how to play, first just on the service court and then, when I was older and more skilled, on the full court. That one-on-one time meant the world to me. During the fall, we watched the Bulldogs on TV and went to a few games in Athens. Once we even dressed head to toe in UGA gear and posed for family photos. Neither of us would ever attend UGA, but to this day, we both bleed red and black.

  Fridays were square dance nights. Someone always brought deviled eggs, and I always ate them (to this day, my stepmom, Linda, will make sure there are deviled eggs for me at any family get-together). Saturday mornings was church league bowling. Dad would rent our shoes and buy Bonnie and me a couple of games. One lane over from us, he would be making a spectacle of himself. He’d toss the ball with all his strength and then he’d try to will it toward the pins using bizarre facial expressions and hilarious sound effects as Bonnie and I burst into laughter.

  If not dancing, bowling, or playing in the yard, we were usually visiting Dad’s parents, Granddad Donald and Grandmom Camille. On the many nights when all the Harps gathered at their place, my grandmother made it her mission to keep us well fed, always asking, “Anybody want a roll?!” She’d cook up a Southern feast in the kitchen, while in the living room my cousins and I would crowd around my grandfather. “Pull my finger,” he’d say, offering it to me with a grin. Once I did, he’d pull me in close and squeeze the life out of me till I couldn’t take it anymore. I loved those hugs. I could hear his heartbeat and smell his aftershave. Then I’d get my turn at riding his leg like a horse. Those were good days.