Sometimes Life doesn’t happen by design. Floridian Galey Alix knows this firsthand.
She was engaged to the love of her life; she had a great job as a Wall Street executive and she was looking forward to starting her married life in a beautiful home in Connecticut, the rooms of which she had designed herself.
Sounds like the perfect life, doesn’t it?
“Life was so good … until it really wasn’t,” admits Alix.
And while — spoiler — everything worked out in the end, for a while life was tough for Alix, the star of an HGTB show premiering this spring. We’ll get to that in a bit. Because her story really starts after college.
Finding Her Way
Born and raised in Gainesville, Fla., Alix attended the University of Florida, majoring in public relations, with plans to go to law school. “I had my heart set on Yale Law School,” she says.
The day after she graduated, Alix bought an LSAT study guide (LSAT being the test applicants to law school need to take for admission). “I started reading it, and after the first page, I was like — nope, this is not for me,” she quips.
She returned the book, got her money back and went to plan B.
The mom of her boyfriend at the time was a portfolio manager on Wall Street and did well. Alix decided then to break into the financial world.
After getting an entry-level position at Franklin Templeton Investments, Alix was working at a call center. “You call financial advisors all over the country trying to sell them financial products,” she says. During the 18 months there, she learned everything she could about finance and obtained all necessary licensure needed to land her next job — which would be her dream gig at one of the most prominent Wall Street firms.
Falling Into Design
Just as she had no previous experience in finance, Alix also had no previous experience in design when she began working on the home she and her fiancé had in Connecticut. But that didn’t stop her.
Because she was still living in Florida, Alix would fly north every weekend. Although she wanted to get their home ready for their future, she couldn’t find any designers or contractors who would work on the weekends.
So, she decided, “I’m just going to figure this out myself. And I just started designing and doing construction, even though I’d never designed or done construction in my life,” she says. But for the next year, that’s how she spent every weekend — designing their seven-bedroom, 10-bathroom, 10,000-square-foot home.
“I’d rent a van at Home Depot for $19.99 an hour. I’d drive to all the Home Goods, and I’d be loading couches on dollies. We had an elevator inside the house, so I’d bring [everything] into the elevator,” she recalls. “I didn’t pay any movers. I didn’t pay any designers and I didn’t pay any contractors. I just figured it all out.”
A self-described wannabe videographer,” Alix began videoing all the rooms as she did them. But it was just to show about 900 family and friends on Instagram what she was doing.
A year passed, the house was completed, and she resigned from her Wall Street job.
While everything about her life looked amazing — on social media, especially — Alix says, “I was battling an eating disorder.”
And life, as she knew it, was about to change drastically.
The Pressure
This wasn’t the first time Alix had dealt with an eating disorder. She ran track in college, and while wanting to stay thin for that, she had on-and-off issues with it.
“I think I put so much pressure on me to be perfect, to be flying back and forth every single weekend and staying up all hours to get this house done,” she says. “With this disease, when you feel out of control, you start to control other things. I was controlling food in a very unhealthy way.”
She opened up to her fiancé about it and he was upset she’d been keeping her eating disorder from him. As a result, he felt trust was broken and ended their engagement.
Alix packed up her belongings and her dogs and headed back to Florida, where she had no job, no place to live and no more fiancé.
Figuring It Out
Alix began seeing a therapist who specialized in eating disorders. And luckily for her, she was able to get her old job back.
She spent time away from social media. The last thing she wanted to read was people asking how the wedding was, the honeymoon, etc. Although Alix set her Instagram account so that people could still see her videos, she made sure she couldn’t see it. Then she worked on herself.
Eventually, when she logged back on, she was stunned. “I was in shock because I didn’t see a single person’s name I recognized. I had thousands of new followers. Strangers were saying, ‘Hey, I saw that you did this place in Connecticut. Can you convert my garage to a gym?’ Or can you make my living room into a theater room?” And on and on…
An acquaintance, Carrie Calloway, asked Alix if she could make over her home in Boynton Beach. Alix thought about turning Calloway down. But then she had second thoughts.
“I realized that instead of sitting home and feeling sorry for myself, I could spend my weekends trying to make other people happy,” says Alix.
One weekend, Calloway and her family went to Disney World and Alix went to work. She took video, as she had before, while she worked on the house. But this time, she recorded their reaction as well.
Her video went viral, with 30 million views.
And those initial 900 followers have now grown to four-and-a-half million between her Instagram and TikTok accounts.
Hollywood, Or HGTV, Comes Calling
Alix assembled a team of friends to help her redo houses on weekends. Just like her, none of them are professionals — which is why they never do anything that would require permits — but they’ve learned with her.
“I remember getting my first roll of wallpaper, then realizing I needed wallpaper glue to get it to stick to the wall,” says Alix. “But we put [glue] on the wall, then tried to put the paper on. We realized you put the glue on the backside of the wallpaper so it adheres to the wall. We also learned that you can’t cut it with scissors.”
All team members have full-time during-the-week day jobs. One is a nurse, another a lawyer, one a teacher, etc. Alix maintains her full-time executive position on Wall Street and is using her weekends and personal vacation days to film the show.
Here’s how her makeovers work: she buys what they need to do the makeover and everything is delivered to the client’s home — but they aren’t allowed to see any of it. The team comes over to open the boxes and check the inventory. “Then we cover it with blankets until their install. And they move out for a couple of days,” explains Alix.
Alix kept doing houses and posting videos. One day, Drew Scott from “The Property Brothers” reached out to her. That’s when she knew things were exploding — but this time, in a good way.
She ended up making a sizzle reel with Rabbit Foot Studios, then a pilot and then a series, starring Alix and her team was greenlighted for its first season on HGTV.
Today, Alix says that she still gets anxious — whether it’s before posting a video on social media or finishing someone’s room or home. But she’s making sure her mental health is good. In the show, as she does in all her videos, she wears a baseball cap pulled down as well as her trademark T-shirts and overalls.
“I told [HGTV] I wanted to be able to wear a hat in every scene. I’d like to be unrecognizable — if that’s humanly possible,” she says. But it’s not because she's ashamed of her looks. “I think I look good; I’m proud of my body. [But] I want the focus to be on what I’m creating.”
And while she’s gone through a great deal over the last number of years, Alix loves where she is and what she’s doing.
“At the end of the day, what matters is that you enjoyed the process. You enjoy the people you’re doing it with and the experience that you’re having — what you’re creating for the homeowner that could change their life,” says Alix. “That’s why I’m doing this — for the experience I get to have with the people I love.”