Joanna Gaines Reveals What Ended ‘Fixer Upper’ At Its Peak
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It’s almost hard to believe that it’s only been 13 years since Chip and Joanna Gaines first garnered the attention of the nation with the premiere of Fixer Upper on HGTV.
What may be even more surprising is that it’s been almost a decade since Fixer Upper ended.
Since the popular renovation reality series premiered in 2013, the couple based out of Waco, Texas, has left an indelible mark on how homes are built with their emphasis on open floor plans.
Joanna’s interior design sensibilities seemingly became fashionable overnight, and continues to remain desirable through her family’s design and lifestyle empire: Magnolia.
Recently, Joanna opened up about why she and Chip stepped away from the HGTV series that put them on the map, and just as their success was taking off.
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Joanna Gaines Shares Why ‘Fixer Upper’ Came To An End
Speaking on the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb this month, Joanna Gaines opened up about why she and her husband of 23 years, Chip, decided to part ways with HGTV, ending Fixer Upper as its popularity was still on the rise.
Describing the time in their life leading up to the final season of Fixer Upper on HGTV, which aired from 2017 to 2018, Joanna said that “the intentionality [was] gone” and described both herself and Chip as “just showing up,” adding, “That doesn’t feel fulfilling. It actually feels as though we’re part of this machine that is like, ‘What’s the life here?'”
For the Gaines family, that was their first moment to pause, with Joanna noting they “were seeing great reward,” but it was at a significant cost.
She then said:
“Stopping in that moment was basically us saying, ‘Nothing is worth it.’ 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.”
When Fixer Upper ended in 2018, Chip and Joanna set their sights on the launch of Magnolia Network, which kicked off in early 2021.
With that, Fixer Upper: Welcome Home ran for one season in 2021, and has since been followed-up by shows dedicated to specific Gaines’ projects, like Fixer Upper: The Lake House and Fixer Upper: Colorado Mountain Home.
There’s also the quarterly magazine, Magnolia Journal; her cooking project, Magnolia Table; and the various projects and shops at the Silos.
Even amid their more recent output of projects, Joanna admitted that three years ago, around 2023, she began feeling a sense of “dread” about doing their work, joking, “You start, like, wishing for a stomach bug.”
“As far as Magnolia, we’ve been doing this for almost 25 years, and we’ve never really stopped,” Joanna said. “About three years ago, we stopped seeing vision, we stopped remembering, like, ‘Why are we doing this?'”
From that feeling, Joanna said that she and Chip chose to take the summer off, but that decision was not without consequences.
Their team, she said, was disappointed, and she noted, “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?’”
Striving to never feel burnout in their work again, Joanna said said there’s a “daily discipline” of listening to how one’s feeling, with Joanna saying those moments of weakness still occur, adding,“‘I feel it creeping up, but I can’t pause my life for months.'”
She said she instead intentionally does things that “fill [her] tank,” such as “The older I get, the more conscious I am of that feeling. Whether that’s time in the garden, a walk, or it’s journaling or time time with my kids — whatever it is, it’s filling my tank.”
It’s from experience, Joanna said, that you learn how to recognize when your soul is beginning to run dry.
“From a physical standpoint, I can … push past the weariness of the physical, but then you get to, like, that layer of soul weariness, and that’s dangerous, I think.”
Watch Joanna Gaines’ Sept. 7 interview with Hoda Kotb, here:
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