‘Home Town’: Erin Napier Marks 16th Anniversary of Meeting Husband Ben, Her ‘Biggest Secret Crush’

Erin Napier was pretty excited to celebrate the 16th anniversary of when she first met her husband, Ben Napier, on Monday, while attending Ole Miss. The stars of Home Town, which airs on HGTV and shows the couple restoring homes in Mississippi, had quite the fast turnaround from meeting to deciding that they’d like to be married one day. She shared that story in her most recent Instagram post.

The two met while working on their school yearbook on Dec. 7, 2004. The next day she said in her post from 2019 that they took photos for the project and then followed that up the next day with their first official date, and she even introduced him to her mother that same day. Four days later, she recalled, the two knew they would be married one day. “It sounds crazy to you, maybe,” she wrote. “But it makes perfect sense to me.” This means that 16 years ago on Monday, the two first spent the day together as Erin referred to Ben as “my biggest secret crush.” She then quoted a passage from their book, “Make Something Good Today” before saying she still feels “so lucky to work alongside him every day, even during a pandemic and the weirdest season in the history of [Home Town].” The two, who married in 2008, have one daughter, three-year-old Helen, together.

The new season of Home Town is set to premiere on HGTV on Sunday, Jan. 3. The fifth season will show the two and how their work was affected by the coronavirus, though she writes that they did all they could to make the season “feel seamlessly normal for” the viewers. The fourth season came out at the beginning of 2020 with the series renewed for its fifth season in May. The new installment will feature 16 episodes, the longest season to date. The first two contained 11 episodes each, with the latest one featuring 13.

In addition to the new season release date being revealed, HGTV also tabbed the two stars for another series, a spin-off called Home Town: Ben’s Workshop. The new series will air on the Discovery Channel’s new streaming platform, discovery+, on Jan. 4. The spin-off will show Ben mixing it up with some celebrities as part of a four-episode season to showcase his craftsmanship.