Things became tense among Meri Brown, husband Kody Brown and his three other wives, Janelle, Christine and Robyn, during the season premiere of Sister Wives on January 20. Meri needed a $40,000 loan from her family in order to make her dream of buying a bed and breakfast in Parowan, Utah, a reality, but the family questioned her lack of a business plan and her refusal to make them equity partners.
“We just don’t have it,” Kody told Meri. So, she declared she would find the money on her own, and in the end, the LuLaRoe retailer tells Us Weekly that is exactly what she did.
“I knew that the funds were not there,” says Meri. “I just felt like, well, I’m just going to have to go do it then. So that’s why I got up and I left and I started working, because I knew that I needed to figure it out because it was something important to me.”
The 48-year-old ultimately did purchase the property, which was built by her great-great-grandparents in 1870, and Lizzie’s Heritage Inn opened for business in December of 2017. She says her decision to move forward with the venture on her own didn’t have anything to do with a desire “to be alone and independent in the business world or anything like that. It was just something that I needed to get done.”
In the past, the family worried that Meri opening a business hours away from home would cause her to withdraw from Kody and her sister wives, but she says that hasn’t been an issue. “It’s not the type of thing that needs a whole lot of hands-on,” the reality star explains of the property, which is a five-hour drive from the Browns’ new home in Flagstaff, Arizona. “I’ve got employees that I hired that are there doing the cooking and cleaning and stuff like that, and my mom is there.”
Though Kody, Janelle, Christine and Robyn have had their doubts about her venture, Meri now says, “I know they support it, and I think that if I needed help with [the inn] they would be right there.”
For more about the new season of Sister Wives, check out the new issue of Us Weekly, on stands now.
Sister Wives airs Sundays at 8pm on TLC.
With reporting by Marc Lupo
