Dave and Jenny Marrs first came into the spotlight with HGTV’s “Fixer to Fabulous,” which has been running on the channel since 2019, with a total of 6 seasons having been released at the time of writing. The now-Arkansas-based duo met as new college graduates and were married with kids by the time the show aired for the first time. Once they started being featured on national television building new houses and renovating historic ones, it didn’t take them much time to become one of the few HGTV couples fans truly love and admire.
As with any human being, Dave and Jenny — who hail from Colorado and Florida, respectively — have endured a substantial number of tragic events from time to time, and so have their children. However, the Marrses have also risen above all adversities and stood united as a strong, loving family throughout the years. Read on to find out about the most tragic events that have struck the Marrs family in the last two decades.
They faced financial struggles for years before finding success
In 2002, Dave Marrs started working for a company named Newell Rubbermaid in Arkansas. It was during Dave’s time at the company that he met Jenny, who worked for Newell Rubbermaid from another location, and the two started dating. However, with Dave moving from one state to another to another for the job, the couple was initially forced to live apart. Bored of the job after serving a two-year-long tenure, Dave started a building business in Northwest Arkansas, and Jenny moved in with him, quitting her job, too. Although Dave knew a thing or two about building, thanks to his father being a builder, the duo planned on trying their luck in Arkansas for no more than two years. However, they now call the state their home.
Shortly after moving to Northwest Arkansas, the couple struggled to make ends meet. Jenny returned to the corporate world and found a job she stuck to for 10 years. She told People in 2023, “I kept a real job so that we had insurance, and someone to sign loans for the houses while [Dave] was building.” By 2016, Jenny had quit her job and worked on house-flipping projects with Dave for quite a while. That year, two HGTV producers offered them their own shows. Being skeptical about whether a show focused on them would succeed, they refused the first offer but ended up accepting the second one. The result was “Fixer to Fabulous.”
Their path to parenthood was difficult
With infertility posing problems in the first few years of their marriage, Dave and Jenny Marrs decided they would opt for adoption instead. However, once they dived deeper into the procedure, the then-future “Fixer to Fabulous” stars realized they weren’t as lucky as they’d hoped. Thankfully, just when the duo was starting to get tired of struggling to start a family, a miracle happened.
As Jenny told Kelly’s Korner in 2016, “In 2008, we jumped on a roller coaster when we started the process to adopt — doors slammed shut left and right. After another failed match, we decided to make one last ditch effort with fertility treatments and finally became pregnant with twin boys in the fall of 2009.”
While the twins were indeed a miracle, Jenny’s pregnancy didn’t exactly go as planned. The couple, especially Jenny, experienced issues that were horrifying, to say the least. The situation became particularly critical near the end of her pregnancy and when she gave birth.
Their twins had a ‘terrifying entrance into the world’
Speaking of her book, “House + Love = Home: Creating Warm, Intentional Spaces for a Beautiful Life,” in the caption of an Instagram post, Jenny Marrs shared what she and Dave Marrs went through during the last few weeks of her pregnancy with their twins, Ben and Nathan. As Jenny noted in the post, she went into labor during the twenty-ninth week of her pregnancy, which was quite early for the twins to be born and could have been life-threatening for them. She wrote, “After twelve hours of medical intervention to prevent a premature delivery, I was airlifted to Little Rock because our local hospital’s NICU wasn’t equipped to care for twenty-nine-week-old preemies at the time.”
At Little Rock, they were initially told that Jenny would give birth in a day, but she ended up carrying the twins for about one more month. However, as Jenny put it, their “entrance into the world” was just as “terrifying” as the initial preterm labor that she fought to help her babies grow and be safe in her womb for a few more weeks. In another Instagram post, Jenny stated that in May 2010, she endured a two-day-long labor before the babies were born. Post-birth, the newborns spent a month in the NICU of the Marrses’ neighboring Mercy Hospital, with Dave and Jenny also staying in the hospital to be by their side at all times. Thankfully, Ben and Nathan are now two perfectly healthy teenagers.
They waited over a year to bring their adopted daughter home
With two 18-month-olds in the house, Dave and Jenny Marrs resumed their journey to adopting a child. In November 2012, they decided to adopt their daughter, Sylvie, from the Democratic Republic of Congo. By August 2013, the adoption had been taken care of legally, and the couple had paid a visit to the year-and-a-half-old Sylvie, hoping to take her to Arkansas in September 2013. However, in September, the same month the couple found out about Jenny’s pregnancy, the Congolese government banned children adopted by foreigners from leaving the country. Dave told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2018, “We went to the U.S. Embassy, and they said, ‘We recognize her as your daughter, and you can come here and live with her, but if you try to take her out of the country, you’ll be charged with child trafficking.'”
Due to having an inborn condition that causes frequent ailments and living in an orphanage lacking the means to look after her, Sylvie was placed in foster care. In May 2014, Jenny gave birth to Charlotte, the couple’s fourth child. In July 2014, Sylvie came home and became one of the only four internationally adopted children who were handed over to their adoptive parents due to their health issues. Jenny told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, “Right after [Sylvie] came home, they shut down medical visas, too, so it was wonderful and hard, because we knew all of these other families … and they were still waiting for their children.” The couple welcomed their fifth child, Luke, in June 2019.
Thanks to their busy schedules, they barely get time to relax
With five children in the house, a blueberry farm accommodating loads of animals, and filming their construction work every day, Dave and Jenny Marrs are always busy. As Jenny explained to Better Homes & Gardens, “There’s never a relaxed timeline; it’s always a rush with no wiggle room. We always need everything tomorrow.”
Jenny wakes up at about four in the morning, with the rest of the family getting out of their beds within the next three hours. Once all the farm animals have been fed and the Marrses have had their breakfast, the four school-going kids are sent off to school. The filming starts after Luke’s babysitter arrives at the couple’s house in the morning and ends at about 5 p.m. Dave and Jenny then bring their kids home from different locations where they practice extracurricular activities. Following dinner, the kids wash the dishes (which Jenny says is a “life-changer”) and work on their school assignments before going off to sleep. The weekends are reserved for fun activities, a little bit of chores, and relaxing as much as they can.
However, there’s one downside to sharing the same livelihood as a couple. Jenny notes, “The hard thing about working together is it’s always going. We’re sitting at dinner and Dave says, ‘Hey, did you get the light?’ And I say, ‘Oh, shoot. Let me check.'” Despite having hectic daily routines, the couple is “grateful” for their life together.
A tornado left the family ‘shaken up’
In May 2024, tragedy hit the Marrs family again as a tornado destroyed parts of Northwest Arkansas. The family was a bit away from home for a Memorial Weekend trip at the time and was trapped where they were staying as the storm unleashed its fury in the dead of night. Recalling their experience in an Instagram post shared the next morning, Jenny wrote, “At 2 am, we sat in a tiny closet with seven people, two dogs, a bearded dragon and a lamb … Poor Lukey was terrified and vomited twice out of fear. Sylvie soothed Tommy the lamb in her arms, Charlotte shivered and nestled into the crook of my arm and the big boys kept reassuring their siblings it would be ok.”
The family was trapped there with no electricity and almost no cell phone network for quite a while, as trees fell down on the roads (damaging electricity-carrying wires in the process) and on their truck. Thankfully, the tornado didn’t cause physical harm to the Marrses or their animals. In the said Instagram post, Jenny asked her followers to pray for those affected by the storm, noting, “Please keep northwest Arkansas in your prayers, friends. We are all a little shaken up this morning and sections of our beloved area are destroyed.” Another Instagram post shared by their farm’s account stated that the farm, and even the blueberries, sustained no harm.
Farm life has been both ‘beautiful and brutal’ for the Marrs family
The Marrs family’s Bentonville U-pick blueberry farm is home to many animals. While farm life is indeed peaceful and joyous, it can also be disheartening at times, especially when there are animals involved. The Marrses’ experience with farming hasn’t always been all smooth and serene either. In March 2022, the family witnessed the devastating death of their farm llama, Larry, who suffered for about a week before his demise. Throughout that period, Jenny shared every possible update about his health on social media. Shortly before Larry died, Jenny wrote on Instagram, “He was affected with a parasite that is carried by white tail deer and is very challenging to prevent. This particular parasite travels through the spinal cord and can potentially cause neurological damage which is why he’s likely having such trouble standing again.”
On the day Larry died, Jenny shared a photo of him on Facebook, writing, “Farm life can be both beautiful and brutal. Today, is certainly one of the hard days. And, while I know there is joy to come, I am going to sit in the grief for a bit.” In September 2022, Sunny the sheep, who happened to be Charlotte Marrs’ favorite farm animal, died. In June 2024, Tommy, a malnourished baby sheep recently brought to the blueberry farm, passed away after suffering for two weeks. Jenny shared on Instagram, “We never considered that love, nutrition and medical attention wouldn’t be enough.”
