Don’t Be Fooled! Here Are All the ‘Fixer Upper’ Moments That Are Completely Staged

They both attended Baylor University — but they didn't meet there.

Joanna majored in communications with aspirations to become a journalist. Chip wanted to be a politician or a baseball player.

Those "house hunting" scenes in Fixer Upper? They're fake, according to a participant.

"You have to be under contract to be on the show," season three participant David Ridley said. "They show you other homes but you already have one. After they select you, they send your house to Chip and Joanna and their design team."

So where did they meet? At at a tire shop.

The couple met in 2001 while Joanna was working at her father's tire shop. Chip came in to get his brakes fixed where he chatted up with Joanna. The rest is history.

"I got my brakes fixed once or twice a month, just so I could have the opportunity to meet this fox," Chip said, who knew about Joanna from the commercials she starred in to promote her father's store.

They struggled to make ends meet.

"I remember when we first got married the only money we had was what was in Chip’s pocket," Joanna said. "He always had a wad of cash, but we were broke. If I needed to go grocery shopping it’s whatever was in his pocket. That’s how we paid the bills."

They found fame by accident.

Their big break came when a TV producer contacted Joanna after seeing a picture of one of her flips.

"All of this sort of fell into our laps," Chip said. "We were just living our life out here in little bitty Waco. We had dreams and aspirations like most folks, but this has really been something else."

They've been working together since they've been dating.

"When [Joanna] started watching me do what I did, which was flip these investment properties, she got kind of curious and interested," Chip said. "I love what I do from a construction standpoint, but in regards to interior design and colors, forget it. I would lean on her—What color do we do this wall? How can we do this floor plan? So it didn't take very long in our career for her to really evolve into a dominant reality in my business."

Their company, Magnolia, was actually inspired by their first dates.

"When we were just dating, I would pick these blooms from Magnolia trees," Chip said. "If you've ever seen them, they are almost just bowl-like, and that whole thing just always inspired us. So when we had the opportunity and were trying to figure out what to name her little boutique, Magnolia Market just stood out to us."

Every time they travel, Joanna does this romantic ritual.

Whenever Chip travels, Joanna leaves a sweet note for him in his bag — and he's saved every single one. "I have a pile of them from over the years," he said.

There are more children and animals on the Fixer Upper set than it appears.

“You’d never know it but sometimes there’s a kid between our legs when we are filming,” Joanna wrote on Instagram.

Despite being TV stars, they do not watch TV.

"Our first year of marriage, we had a fun couple that was our pre-marital counselors and they said, 'Hey, we want to challenge y'all for the first six months of marriage, don't [own] a TV,'" Joanna said. "Then, six months later we looked at each other and said, 'How about another six months?' And it just became one of those things where, 12 years later, we still don't own one."

To watch episodes of Fixer Upper, they have weekly viewing parties at one of their friend's homes.

Sometimes they'd live in their flips before selling the home.

During the early days of their flipping business, the couple would live in the homes while they were being renovated and then move out once they sold them — much to Joanna's dismay, who would often fall in love with the house and want to stay. “[I would say,] 'Come on, Chip. This one’s really nice. Can’t we just stay in this one?'" she said.

They've been slammed with three lawsuits.

The first was back in 2016, when they were sued by the owners of the property next to their store over the location of a fence. The second one was earlier this year by a woman who claimed to have suffered severe head injuries after whacking it on a steel rod while visiting the Magnolia store. And third, Chip was hit with a $1 million lawsuit in April 2017 by former business partners who claim Chip bought them out of the company before Fixer Upper premiered.

HGTV network executives loved the Gaines because they weren't "perfect."

“I think it is their perfect imperfections,” HGTV general manager Allison Page said. “They have the kind of marriage and family you’d want. It’s not perfect. He does silly things, and they occasionally trip over their words or sweat on each other. They are the best of what’s real in life."

They have more than 60 animals on their farm.

"Our home is a hundred-year-old farmhouse that sits on about 40 acres," Joanna said.

They actually like being around each other 24/7.

"One pretty amazing thing we learned early on was that the more time we spent together, the better our relationship was," she said on the Today show. "I think a lot of couples feel the need to get away from each other now and then, to take little breaks, and they come back after a girls' weekend or a guys' fishing trip or something all refreshed and happy to reconnect because they missed each other." But that's just not the case for the two of them. "We were just the opposite and still are. We seem to give each other energy."

Chips wears the same style of clothes he's been wearing since 2003.

He wears Gap 1969 standard-fit jeans and Ariat boots, according to HGTV.

They don't have plans to take Fixer Upper outside of Waco.

"It would be very difficult for us because we have an actual construction company in Waco, Texas," Chip said. "What makes me great is just the fact that I've been with these folks—our electricians, our plumbers, our carpenters—we've got 25 employees that have been with us, at least some of them, since the very beginning. So who we are as a company really stems from our relationships there locally."