Joanna Gaines says the decision she and husband Chip made to end “Fixer Upper” after its fifth season came down to exhaustion that ran deeper than tired muscles or a busy schedule — what she describes as “soul weariness.”
Speaking on the “Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb” podcast, the Waco-based designer and entrepreneur said the couple stepped away from the HGTV show in September 2017, even as it was still drawing huge audiences, because they had lost sight of why they were doing it in the first place.
“When you start realizing you’re living on a thing that’s now… the intentionality is gone, and you’re just showing up… that doesn’t feel fulfilling,” Gaines said. “It actually feels as though we’re part of this machine that is like, ‘What’s the life here?'”
“Fixer Upper” put Waco on the map for home renovation fans everywhere after its 2013 debut, following Chip and Joanna as they turned rundown local houses into finished homes for clients while building out their Magnolia business empire in town. The show made the couple national celebrities well beyond the design world.
Gaines said that even amid that success, she and Chip refused to let the show’s demands come before their family or their well-being.
“I would say that was our first pause of like, ‘We’re doing all this and seeing great reward … this is wonderful,’ but also never at the expense of … our like livelihood, our happiness, our souls.”
She said stopping was a way of checking in with what mattered most. “Stopping in that moment was basically us saying … ‘What’s worth it is, like are we healthy? Are we good? Is our family good?’ That’s the most important thing. So that was really a very pivotal moment for us.”
Gaines said the same pattern resurfaced about three years ago, after the couple had spent nearly 25 years building their business. “We stopped seeing vision. We stopped remembering, ‘Like why are we doing this?'” she said. That time, they took the summer off — a choice she admitted wasn’t without cost to the people around them.
“Which meant disappointing our team, disappointing a lot of things … So it cost us something. It cost people something. But that three months was time for us to go, ‘We need a break. We need clarity. Why are we building this? What are we doing this for?'”
Gaines said she knew the burnout had become serious when she started dreading ordinary workdays, even joking that she caught herself hoping for an illness as an excuse to slow down. “You start like wishing for a stomach bug or … ‘Okay, maybe back surgery this year would be great.’ Like how do I force myself?” she said, laughing.
She drew a distinction between physical tiredness, which she said she can push through, and something she called soul weariness, which she considers far more serious. “From a physical standpoint, I can work till I can … I can push past the weariness the physical, but then you get to that layer of like the soul weariness and that’s dangerous.”
Gaines called that feeling a kind of “holy fear” — a signal she now tries not to ignore.
Building Magnolia in Waco
Chip and Joanna Gaines married in 2003 and have five children: Ella, Drake, Crew, Emmie and Duke. “Fixer Upper” ran for five seasons before ending in 2018, and the couple’s Magnolia Network later launched on Discovery+ in 2021 before taking over the linear Magnolia Network slot from DIY Network in January 2022.
Their Waco footprint has grown steadily around Magnolia Market at the Silos, which includes the Shops at the Silos, Silos Baking Co. and Magnolia Press Coffee Co., along with Magnolia Table elsewhere in the city. The couple also publishes “Magnolia Journal,” has written several lifestyle books, and sells a Magnolia Home furniture line, while Joanna created the Hearth & Hand with Magnolia collection for Target.
In 2023, Chip and Joanna opened the 33-room Hotel 1928 in downtown Waco after renovating a historic building in partnership with AJ Capital, adding to a roster of Magnolia-branded vacation rentals in the city.
