Photos by Daryl Calfee

All Belinda Kelly wants for Christmas is power tools and vintage furniture.

Walking through the pink door of Belinda’s home explains why these are a few of her favorite things. The mid-mod furniture rehabber and decor DIY-er has managed to bring both a heaping handful of holiday magic and modern style to her once unassuming 1950s brick house in Campbell County. But the transformation couldn’t have happened without her trusty tools.

“We bought it from the original owners and builder, which was really fun,” she said. “They had maintained it really well but it visually still looked like it was 1959. Which is what we wanted actually, we wanted something that was well maintained but we could come in and make it exactly what we wanted. So we were super happy to find it.”

The home is the second fixer-upper for Belinda and her husband, Ian. Their first home was in truly rough shape when they bought it and, without much in the way of reno resources, Belinda decided to take matters into her own creative hands.

“My husband wasn’t super into building things when we first married but I was like, let’s get some power tools! We can totally do this! And he was totally down,” she recalled with a laugh. “When we bought our first home, I had just had a baby and I’m looking around this house and we didn’t have stuff to fill it and I thought, this feels sad. So I started picking pieces up and refinishing them or painting them, finding things that I liked and changing them to make them more of what I wanted, for less.”

Before long, Belinda’s talent for hunting down that perfect piece in imperfect shape led to not only lovely furnishings for her own home but also new opportunities as others began to take notice. She began selling her refurbished furniture on Facebook Marketplace, gained a following on Instagram (@belinda_fern), and started getting asked by followers and friends alike to help them design their spaces.

“It turned from selling to also people saying, ‘I like the style of your house, can you help me decorate? Can you come help me with my Airbnb? Can you help me design this space?’ So it’s turned slowly into me doing things for other people, from designing to decorating, redoing furniture to furnishing places, and things like that. It’s been a really fun creative outlet,” Belinda explained.

With more experience under their tool belt, the Kellys bought their current house and second fixer-upper. Dark wood walls, walled-up rooms, and centrally located stairs to the basement posed some unique challenges. Belinda focused on the positives she saw, like the original brass hardware and the mid-century style front door, and decided that—once again—it was power tools to the rescue.

“We took down a bunch of walls, took out a couple of doors,” she recalled. “We built the [stair] railings and installed those [around the newly opened stairwell] and built the cabinets on the other side. I love it now. It turned out to be one of my favorite things about the house.”

With the small footprint now much larger and brighter on the main floor, Belinda shifted her focus to the kitchen, where she painted the cabinets and backsplash, built a cabinet to surround the refrigerator, added new pulls, sewed curtains for the windows, and installed new IKEA countertops.

Unsurprisingly, Belinda’s hands-on approach to life has rubbed off on her son, who has been around the couple’s numerous projects since he was born.

“He has his own little hand tools and he will come and do things with us. He is definitely interested in building things, he is constantly creating things out of cardboard, and has shown interest in the projects we are working on,” she said.

As evidenced by the carefully curated pieces and the “where’s all your stuff?” vibe, Belinda has given thought and intention to each part of her home. Neither sparse nor superfluous, each room is warmly but precisely styled, with a place for everything and everything in its place.

“I like things a little more minimal than probably most people. I’m not a hard-core minimalist at heart but I like things to be pared down and feel like they can breathe and be uncluttered,” she explained. “This is also why I like the streamlined feel of mid-century pieces. They have a lot of clean edges, there aren’t a lot of extra curves and things like that going on. They just feel nice and modern, which appeals to me.”

This love for mid-mod style did pose a bit of a challenge for Belinda when it came to holiday decor. With a husband she describes as a “Clark Griswald Christmas lights” kind of guy and a son still young enough to appreciate the wonder of the season, Belinda has invested in discovering items and ornaments that she loves.

“I definitely lean a little Scandinavian anyway, so I started searching for Scandinavian Christmas decor, which is a lot of reds, which I don’t normally do, but I do like little touches of red at Christmas, and little ceramic houses and little trees. So I feel like I’m finally finding what I really like, which is kind of a mix of a bit traditional but also a bit more modern. I really like how it looks this year,” she said.

The one departure from her “less is more” mantra is the tree, which is strategically busting at the seams with ornaments that somehow appear both artfully placed and perfectly at home on each branch.

“It’s big, it’s got lots of stuff on it, [my son] loves to stand and look at the different ornaments and pull them off, and sometimes the dog pulls them off too!” Belinda said. “It’s different than I would normally lean if I were to go pick something, but I actually really love this tree. It has a lot of family ornaments. I really like that we have handmade ones that my husband’s grandmother made and stuff my son has made. It all gets thrown on there.”

Included among her favorite ornaments are those her son has created over the years and one that a friend made for them the year Belinda and Ian got engaged. Traditions in the Kelly household are simple but memorable: making Christmas crafts and an abundance of cookies, plus an annual voyage to Busch Gardens Christmastown. The presents under the tree are carefully chosen, reflecting their home as a whole.

With stockings hung by the chimney with care, no power tools in sight, and unfinished furniture projects tucked away in the basement (for now), Belinda enjoys pressing pause on all of the busywork so she can be present for her family during the memorable holiday season.

But when the New Year arrives, she already plans to add a new skill to her list: “I really want to learn to weld.”

We take part in many horticultural holiday traditions in the United States, but there’s only one that is beautiful, long-lasting and great for gifting: the Christmas cactus.

Your Christmas tree will eventually turn brown and end up on the curb along with your wreath. Your poinsettia will lose its eye-catching color. But this unique winter-flowering plant can live for literally hundreds of years. Also, cuttings are often given as gifts and passed down through generations, making them the perfect candidate for a special holiday tradition.

There are three popular holiday cacti: the Easter cactus, the Thanksgiving cactus, and the Christmas cactus. Though they can be difficult to tell apart, there are a few subtle differences. The “leaves” of the Christmas cactus will be softly scalloped or bluntly serrated, while the Thanksgiving cactus will be sharply serrated with a claw-like projection on its edges. The Easter variety has very rounded leaf edges.

Cultivating a Christmas Cactus

If you have an established plant, you can actually coax these holiday cacti into blooming with just a few tricks, but you need to get started on this well before your desired bloom date. About six to eight weeks before you want to see some color, you’ll want to make sure your plant is moved to a cool, dark location.

Though the Christmas cactus is native to the rainforests of Brazil, they are actually stimulated to bloom with low lighting and cool weather. Fifty-five degrees is ideal. You’ll also want to make sure they receive 12 to 14 hours of darkness a day. This seems counter-intuitive, but these conditions actually encourage the cactus to put on heavy buds, because the plant thinks it’s dying. In an effort to reproduce, the cactus will bloom.

During this period, water sparingly—only when the soil dries out. At every other watering or so, you might want to use a gentle fertilizer higher in phosphorous. You’ll notice a lot of little buds developing on your plant in no time.

Once your plant is heavy with buds and ready to bloom, put it on display and it will be sure to wow your guests and add a burst of natural color to your Christmas decor. These plants can be kept to bloom on their own time on a shady porch or in your house. Just be sure to maintain mild conditions, dappled sunlight and a humid but not overly wet environment.

A Green Gift to Others

Of course, if you plan to gift cuttings of your cactus, you’ll want to avoid taking the cuttings while the cactus is in bloom or heavy with buds. A few weeks before Christmas is a great time to take the cuttings and propagate individual plants. Better yet, if you get them repotted before Thanksgiving and gift them on turkey day, your friends just might get lucky and have their own blooms by Christmas

These cacti are “epiphytes,” like the very trendy air plant. In their natural environment, they grow on other plants. As such, they prefer a loamy potting mix over traditional soil. Prepare a pot with a moist (but not soaked) cactus or succulent blend soil. You can find this at most garden centers. You can also make it yourself by mixing your own blend of 50 percent peat moss and 50 percent perlite.

Look for healthy leaf segments on your mature Christmas cactus. Then, choose a piece with at least two or three healthy segments above the bottom. The more leaves, the better, as long as you don’t leave the parent plant with too few.

Carefully twist the lower leaf segment off of the plant, being sure to get the very bottom of the segment where it attaches to the top of the one below. You should pull out a small root with it. Then bury the cutting about half way up the bottom segment into the prepared pot, just deep enough so that it can hold itself up.

Some people elect to let the cutting “heal” overnight before repotting it. Your baby cacti will need to be watered or misted only when the top layer of soil is dry. Watch it closely though—this soil type dries out quickly. Once a good root system is established (after about two weeks) you can water more heavily—but remember these plants do not like wet feet.

This plant truly embodies the spirit of the season: offering up beautiful cold-season color, requiring virtually no work, and even doubling as a sentimental and lasting Christmas gift.