Carolyn Dreaver: Fit for Purpose

Situated in West Melton, 15km outside of Christchurch, we speak to retired finance advisor, Carolyn Dreaver about her 12-acre lifestyle property.

West Melton is known for its huge horsing community. It is the largest central unit in the South Island when it comes to racing and breeding horses. This is how Carolyn Dreaver spends most of her time, maintaining the property and spending time with her 4 horses and 2 cocker spaniels.

Carolyn has worked in finance her whole life but is now retired and has been living on her lifestyle block for around 4 years now. Since residing there, she has managed to resow the whole 12 acres with new grass. She explained that it's quite a lengthy process of resowing and keeping the horses off the land, but still maintaining their feed of grass. Horse-riding is great where she is. Her 4 horses, 3 boys and 1 mare keep her busy. There is a 360 hectare forest just 7km up the road, so she usually will take her horses there for rides. She'll also take her dogs out for a walk in the forest.

Before buying this property, Carolyn did look into a lot of types of farms buildings, doing research and getting quotes. She had one farm building but needed a second to store extra hay when harvesting in the summertime and have shelter for the horses during the colder months.

Carolyn was very happy with her open 3-bay barn, designed and structured by Goldpine, specifically to store hay. She wanted to go with a wooden shed as it’s kinder on the horses than metal.

"Goldpine recommended some builders to me because I didn't have a builder so that was really helpful, and I was really happy with the builder that they recommended. It went up really fast, I think it was within two weeks. The service was great, I couldn't fault it, yeah, I definitely recommend them."

Carolyn took a while to figure out what product and service would be best to build her second farm building but always kept coming back to Goldpine.

"Goldpine was the company that was stood out as by far the best. I dealt with a guy called Dave and he was excellent and offered good friendly service. When I phoned up to enquire, he was really helpful. He wanted to pop in the car and come out and see the property and see that it was right for the barn I had chosen. He was dropping off brochures — that's what hooked me also — obviously the price and the quality of the product but you've also got to have a good service and that's important to me, and David was right on the money with the service as well."

"I knew I made the right decision because the whole process came together smoothly, and nothing went wrong – it was just a dream. Very good experience and I can recommend them to anybody."

Carolyn is very happy with the turnout of her farm building. When asked what she thought of it, her response was, "It's a cracker as they’d say".