The Love Shack

The Love Shack, after completion.

The Love Shack

Our story together started out like this…

We fell in LOVE!  Then we shacked up! It’s as simple as that.  We had so much in common, especially our love of landscaping, not to mention our hard out competitive nature and a trait we both seemed to exude -  being thoroughly driven by passion!

Settling into the Warblers Cottage together was the first step.  It was fairly basic but certainly comfortable enough to live in.  Dave had owned the property with a previous partner for several years.  We settled in for a bit while we decided on what our future might hold.

Not knowing whether to stay or go, we decided to test our relationship by living in a caravan for a year.  Living and landscaping in a Rockwood Caravan, (great name we thought!), while we planned to travel throughout New Zealand.  We rented out Warblers Retreat and set about on our new adventure.

Funnily enough, we never left the North Shore!  There was plenty of landscape work for us, including a lot of Council work.  And obviously, our relationship held together very well.  We thoroughly enjoyed our time living in the caravan, however there was the hankering for something more.

After friends had shown an interest in buying the property we returned to Warblers Retreat to do a tidy up.  It was at that point we decided we would stay and we would knuckle down and do some renovating – inside and out.  We moved back into the Cottage and started on our new venture of a major makeover.

The Cottage was where we lived for the first couple of years.  We loved the fact that it received all day sun, it was so easy and comfortable to live in, and you felt very connected to nature through the large windows.  In fact the majority of the windows are made of mirror glass which means you can clearly see out, but not in.  This gives you maximum privacy, but the best part about it is that the birds see themselves in the mirror and love to preen themselves allowing you to watch some of our NZ native birds up very close – from only inches away.

The Cottage is now available for our guests to stay and enjoy the pleasures we had in staying there.   If you’re interested in looking at the Cottage, please feel free to give us a call and we’ll happily show you.