Image credit: Warner Bros. Discovery/HGTV
The Cover
Chelsea and Cole DeBoer are the cover feature of 605 Magazine‘s April family issue, and the interview is one of the most candid the couple has given in recent memory. Between the PauseRewind sit-down published in late March and the 605 feature, Chelsea has been doing a lot of reflecting — about where she started, how she got here, and what she would do differently.
The DM That Started Everything
Chelsea and Cole caught the design bug while building their own home on 25 acres outside of Tea, South Dakota — land Cole negotiated up from 10 acres — and began documenting the process on social media. That led Chelsea to slide into HGTV‘s Instagram DMs, pitch their story, and immediately deleted the message out of embarrassment. The network responded anyway, and “Down Home Fab” was greenlit.
“I feel like that’s so out of character for me to like, shoot my shot on things like that,” she told PauseRewind. “But I was feeling brave that night, I guess. And I just sent a little DM, and I remember I deleted it right after I sent it, because I was like, ‘I’m so embarrassing.’” She later wished she had kept it. “So then after we got the show, I was like, ‘Oh, I wish I could see that message.’”
What HGTV Gave Her That MTV Couldn’t
Chelsea has been candid lately about the contrast between her two TV lives. The shift started with a moment in the car with her daughter Aubree.
“Once Aubree got to a certain age, I could almost feel a shift, and she was starting to speak up and give her perspective on how she was feeling about things,” Chelsea told 605. “In that moment I was like, ‘Okay, I want to protect this,’ and it was such a gut feeling it was time to really think about it and see if this was feeling right anymore.”
She left “Teen Mom 2” after Season 10 in 2020 and has not looked back. “I feel like there’s a little bit more respect or something being able to be tied to something like HGTV,” she told PauseRewind. “And to me, career-wise, that just means a lot to me. And so I feel like people take you a little bit more seriously when you’re on HGTV.”
On her kids and cameras now: the children are comfortable on set mainly because the crew brings snacks. Cole joked that their kids stopped asking when the camera people were coming and started asking when the snacks were coming.
Working Together, Living Together
Cole went from working construction and barely seeing Chelsea to spending every day with her — which he described simply: “I went from working construction, never seeing her, to now being able to be with her every day.”
Chelsea told 605 the partnership works because they are genuinely in it together. “I feel like we do better together, for sure, and it’s also great having someone for all the high highs and the low lows. A lot of times if you work separately and you have something amazing happen to you, it’s not as exciting as it would be unless the other person experienced it too.”
What’s Next
Beyond the show, the couple runs Down Home by DeBoers, their home goods store in Tea, which recently celebrated its two-year anniversary. Chelsea has also launched Down Home Design, a residential design firm she runs alongside designer Mary Tjon-Joe-Pin, taking on high-end projects both locally and nationally. Their dream clients? Country singers. “If someone would be open to just going full Old Western, that would be so sick,” Chelsea said.
“Down Home Fab” Season 3 is streaming now on Max and Discovery+.
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