Chip Gaines calls wife Joanna the ‘girl of my dreams’

They are teammates not only in work, but in life.

Chip Gaines celebrated his 17th wedding anniversary to wife Joanna, 42, with a heartmelting tribute on Sunday.

The HGTV star, 45, posted a throwback from the day he married the ‘girl of my dreams.’   

‘Juuuust married! Everything about you has made everything about me better. And 17 years later I’m still learning from and loving on the most incredible woman in the world. After all these years Joanna Lea Stevens, you really are the girl of my dreams.. Happy 17th sweet girl. I love you,’ Chip wrote on Instagram.

In the throwback photo, Chip kissed his new wife on her cheek as they rode off into their happily ever after. 

Joanna looked blissful as she smiled towards the camera, wearing a tiara and veil.

Chip shared a second, more recent photo of Joanna sitting at the bottom of a staircase.

Chip and Joanna married in 2003, but sparks weren’t necessarily flying when the couple first met.

‘It wasn’t love at first sight for Chip and me,’ Joanna recently wrote in an essay for the Magnolia Journal. 

‘For one thing, I was typically attracted to guys who were more on the quiet side,’ she wrote in an essay for the magazine, entitled Slow Yes. 

‘Based on our first date, it was clear that Chip was anything but quiet,’ she recalls, describing him as ‘all over the place’ as he went on about all the risks he wanted to take and his dreams of starting companies and flipping houses.

‘I was wondering if he was just a bit crazy,’ Joanna remembered thinking at the end of the date.

Initially, Joanna didn’t think they would make a great match.

‘In my mind, I somewhat instinctively checked his penchant for risk and chatty nature as two reasons we probably wouldn’t go on a second date,’ she said.

Even though he was totally not her type, there was something about Chip that inspired Joanna to go after her own dreams.

‘All the ideas and dreams he held for himself were anything but ordinary, and he talked about the world around him through the lens of untapped potential,’ Joanna wrote. ‘When Chip did eventually stop talking, if only to take a breath, I found myself wanting to fill the silence with plans and dreams of my own.’

Fortunately, she decided to explore what was between them.

‘This near-stranger had drawn out a side of me that I didn’t yet know existed,’ Joanna wrote. ‘My gut told me there was something there worth waiting for. Our lives have beat to this same rhythm ever since.’

And the rest really was history.

Now the couple, who have turned their house flipping business into an empire, share five children together: Drake, 15, Ella, 14, Duke, 12, Emmie, 10, and Crew, one.

The couple became HGTV stars with their series Fixer Upper, and are now poised to launch their own TV channel, the Magnolia Network.   

The network was initially supposed to debut October 4, but has been delayed due to the coronavirus crisis.