IN 2009, Brenda Rivera Stearns texted an encouraging Bible verse to a friend but entered the phone number incorrectly. Call it serendipity or divine intervention, but the wrong-number message instead reached Isaiah Stearns, 700 miles away. It made him smile, so he responded. A year later, they married.
Their story has gone viral several times, with appearances on The Today Show and Tamron Hall. Even a Hollywood producer reached out. But for the parents of six children, destiny wasn’t finished with them quite yet.
After the birth of their youngest, Ezra, the Stearns’ 1,800-square-foot home was nearly bursting at the seams. What was once the perfect starter house now felt cramped and stifling. “We loved our home, but we needed something bigger,” Brenda recalls. “We wanted our kids to have their own rooms and privacy as they grow into teenagers. And they needed a yard. We wanted them to be outside.”
Because the family, who then lived in Ohio, didn’t have any ties keeping them there, they searched a vast radius. But their wish list was simple: They wanted an older home, more bedrooms, and green space. Isaiah shared listing after listing with Brenda, but none jumped out to her.
One day, Isaiah sent a property located in the quaint town of Cambridge City (an hour east of Indianapolis). Perched atop a hill, the 1850 Italianate home offered nearly 5,700 square feet of living space, enormous rooms, and a 6.5-acre homestead. It was in beautiful shape, having been well-maintained by a devoted, preservation-minded owner.
From the very first picture, Brenda gasped and said, “Let’s go see this house!” Barely a step into the door, “I felt that spark in my heart,” Brenda says. “I said, ‘I don’t care what we have to do, we’re going to live here.’” By the end of the tour, she was in love, feeling in her bones that they were meant to be there.
Logistics didn’t work in their favor, though. Once the Stearns’ Ohio home was listed, it sat on the market for months without an offer. To add insult to injury, the Cambridge City home was at the top of their budget. “Our finances didn’t make sense for this to happen,” Brenda recalls. After months at a standstill, they made the difficult decision to pull their house off the market.
Several months later, they attended a birthday party at a historic home that reminded them of Cambridge City. As they watched their kids happily play outside, Brenda says, “We thought, ‘This is what our family needs. Let’s go look at it again.’” Isaiah checked the listing, and they were thrilled to see it was still available and even more delighted that the price had been lowered, better aligning it with their budget.
On the second tour, they met the seller, who walked with them through the home and answered all their questions. “Meeting him solidified things for us,” Isaiah says. “He wouldn’t have lived here for 20 years without taking good care of it. It settled things in my mind.”
Their own home was put on the market again and finally received an offer, but the buyers’ requests left a serious dent in their bank account. Now faced with furnishing a home more than three times the size of their previous one and up against a tight budget, Brenda turned her creativity toward the secondhand market. “Thrifting is my love language,” she says.
Besides serving as retail therapy, her thrifting prowess is well-received online. In addition to homeschooling the kids, Brenda is a popular content creator with 135,000 Instagram followers and 1.4 million TikTok likes. Previously, her material focused on motherhood, postpartum, and body positivity, but since entering the old house/DIY realm, she has gained thousands of enthusiastic new followers.
With a design style she describes as eclectic, Brenda says, “I thrive on uniqueness. I love anything Victorian or ornate but also love modern. It’s a mix of everything but always unique, not traditional.” Because the house has such good bones, nearly all the necessary updates are purely cosmetic. So far, Brenda has tackled the dining and living rooms. Both prove the transformative power of paint, wallpaper, and fabulous decor.
“I don’t mind the yellow, but it was everywhere,” she says of the buttery chartreuse nearly covering the first floor. To soften the living room, she chose Benjamin Moore’s Windy Sky, a delicate, gauzy shade of blue. After discovering layers of wallpaper underneath the wainscoting, she went through the tedious process of removing it all, then skim-coated, added new trim, painted, and put up Milton & King wallpaper. With the living room emanating freshness, she turned her attention to the dining room.
The dining room has only one window, so Brenda knew it needed a brighter, livelier color palette. A nonfunctional fireplace and plain mantle (that wasn’t original to the house) both provided opportunities for updating. Through a brand partnership, Brenda received lovely floral, mosaic tiles. Determined to beautify the room but with no prior tiling knowledge, she consulted YouTube and ChatGPT for step-by-step instructions.
“I got frustrated so many times,” she says with a laugh, “It was a challenge.” But the result was worthwhile. The mosaic fireplace surround is a showstopper, giving the room a warm, dreamy feel.
When choosing wallpaper, Brenda turned to a design she had saved years ago on Pinterest. “When we moved into this house, I knew it had to have its place here. What drew me to the wallpaper was how unique it looked. It has a modern vibe to it but also old and antique that I love,” she says.
Because the modernized damask of rosy pink and cream was so special, Brenda didn’t want to hang it in the traditional sense. Instead, she transformed one wall into a statement, creating visual interest by adding ornate trim to frame sections of the wallpaper. The result looks like large-scale art, and the opposite wall features classically hung paper to showcase the entire pattern.
Moving through the home is an experience that can’t be rushed. The combination of beautifully preserved original features and the uniqueness of the decor demands frequent pauses of appreciation. It’s a vibrant collection of pieces with personality because so many of Brenda’s thrifted finds come with a story—like the 1987 L.S. Ayres dining room chairs that came in their original packaging. Brenda jokes that the only things she buys for the house on Amazon are Command Strips, her favorite vehicle for securing art and mirrors.
On both floors, soaring 15-foot ceilings make the scale of the rooms and hallways feel palatial. Another telltale old house feature is the rooms’ connectivity. “The layout may feel like a labyrinth as you’re walking through, but it’s super easy. It’s just one big square. There are three rooms on each side and then three rooms at the top, with the hallway in the middle,” Brenda explains.
The Stearns’ daughters—Victoria (14), Veronica (12), and Vanessa (9)—have bedrooms on one side of the second floor, while their sons—Sammy (11), Benjamin (6), and Ezra (3)—are on the other. All the rooms are large, and each includes its own closet (a rarity in old houses). While Brenda has a vision for each of their rooms, it will be slow going. “There’s painted-over wallpaper in a lot of the bedrooms, so it’s very time consuming to remove,”
she says.
There are two sets of stairs, the formal set in the foyer and the enclosed servant staircase closer to the kitchen. From an upstairs bathroom, a door opens to another set of stairs leading to an immense attic.
The delights don’t end there. One final staircase in the attic leads up to the home’s most jaw-dropping feature: a belvedere cupola. While some cupolas are merely decorative, a belvedere is functional—used primarily for enjoying pleasant views. It’s an incredible lookout, and though the family doesn’t yet use the space often, Brenda’s creative wheels are turning. “I want to renovate it into a telescope room, with lots of lounging chairs and telescopes to look at the stars, pillows everywhere, and make it all cozy with twinkly lights. I feel like I’m in my own Disney story up here,” she says.
While the couple’s to-do list of projects feels endless, they’re in no rush to tackle everything at once. “Our life has changed with this house. From our marriage to how our kids behave, our quality of life is so much better,” Brenda says, “I feel like we’re the best we’ve ever been. It’s so silly that it’s a house, a thing, but it’s more than that. It’s a dream come true.”
