Flanked by decorative wreaths, and even Jolly Saint Nick on a sleigh, a Weissport home is all decked out for the holiday season.

Kelly Mason and his wife, Roy Lynne Mason, of 211 Park St., have yet again transformed their picturesque home into a winter wonderland of sorts.

It’s been that way ever since the couple moved to the area in May 2020 from Stephenville, Texas, which is southwest of Fort Worth, in the midst the of COVID-19 pandemic.

Christmas decorations

Kelly Mason said this year, the couple decided to decorate the outside of their home with wreaths to reflect the look of the home, which was originally built in 1842 as a home and office for then attorney Henry Boyer.

Mason said that when the couple purchased the home, there was a box of wreaths. The couple has decorated their home with about 20 wreaths on the iron fencing around the house.

Along with the striking wreaths, another feature that sticks out is a sleigh Mason purchased three years ago that has a Santa Claus sitting inside of it.

“I painted it, rebuilt it, made it a fixture in our yard for the holidays,” Mason said. “We decorate it in the spring with flowers, in the fall with pumpkins, hay bales.”

Mason described how the sleigh appeared the first year that they decorated it.

“The first year we did that, when we got the sleigh, I got a hunter’s decoy deer and my wife and I decorated it with a saddle and jingle bells,” he said. “And I took a shiny Christmas ball and glued it on the nose of the deer to make it look like Rudolph.”

Mason said they usually start decorating right after Thanksgiving, and added this year it took about a week to do the outside.

“A lot of people say you have a beautiful home,” he said. “A typical comment is ‘it looks like a Hallmark Card,’ which thrills me.”

Mason said they also decorated a porch that used to be the family entrance to the home (they use the other porch as the main entrance to the home) that had two fence posts that were pointed that looked like vintage skis, so he made them into a porch decoration by attaching straps to make them look like old skis and added some greenery to give it a holiday-type decor.

“I’m pleased with the way it turned out,” he said. “(With the recent heavy winds), I’ve had to do almost daily maintenance on the garland.”

Interior has been remodeled

“We bought this house as a project,” Mason said. “We had it professionally painted three years ago outside; I was not going to get on a three-story ladder and paint our house.”

Mason explained they have gone through all of the rooms individually, repaired and repainted, “just restored it to as close to original as we possibly could on literally a shoestring budget.”

He said one of the first rooms they did was to restore the upstairs bathroom from top to bottom, complete with new flooring, paint, vanity, and also hand stenciled the walls.

“I enclosed the wall of the hallway to expand the bathroom downstairs under the stairs,” Mason said. “There was a semidetached summer kitchen (an outbuilding where before modern appliances where they would do their cooking in the summer to keep the heat out of the house).”

In addition, Mason said there was an outside porch that was out of the back door of the house, so he turned that outside porch into what is now the butler’s pantry that joins the summer kitchen now, enclosed the porch, put a roof on it and exterior wall and turned it into a butler’s pantry into the kitchen.

“The summer kitchen was kind of a ragtag workshop, and the walls were kind of peeling or falling down (old plaster work),” he said. “We turned that into a guest room, completely restored it.”

Mason described one of his latest projects where he built a full bath off that new guest room.

“Originally when we got the house, there was a full bath upstairs and a toilet and sink bathroom downstairs under the stairs,” he said. “I added the full bathroom adjoining the guest room that used to be the summer kitchen. When I built the butler’s pantry, I put a door to access the summer kitchen, which is now the guest room so you wouldn’t have to go outside to come back into it. We have painted, trim, scrape trim, restored lots of trim, painted every single room.”

According to Mason, the kitchen was “very ’70s, not very functional at all, and I literally gutted the kitchen, took all of the cabinets out, all of the appliances out, and I relocated the sink and put a new stove in. We put in a Hoosier cabinet, basically trying to recreate maybe a 1940s-type kitchen, yet with modern appliances. We put ceiling tiles on the ceiling, put in one of the old cast iron sinks (basically a farm-type sink) that have the drain board veins built into it.”

Mason said on the carriage house, half of the roof literally had caved in when they purchased the house, so the couple hired a professional roofer to put a new roof on it.

“It’s been a work in progress for literally five, five-and-a-half years here,” he said. “We’re very proud of it, done it all on a very shoestring-related budget, where we watch a lot of these home-renovated homes where they put hundreds of thousands of dollars into it; we’ve put love, our backs and our brains into it rather than money.”

Mason was quick to credit his wife, Roy Lynne, whom he said “has been there every step of the way, and has contributed greatly to what we have done.”

A retired graphic designer with over 30 years experience, Mason also does guitar restoration, repair and setup in his spare time.