A basket full of plums sits on the floor of Wyett House's new kitchen, the fruit of just one branch of the huge tree out back, while Stuart Ferguson makes lunch and his wife, Carmel, potters in the backyard.
It's a result of years of hard work, which both can now do in the comfort of the historic Greytown house that they fell in love with eight years ago and have since finished restoring to its former beauty.
Formerly named The Willows due to two old willows at the rear of the house, Wyett House was built in 1856 for Greytown's first doctor, Dr J Smith, then only a third of the size it is now. The house was added to in 1872, and maiden sisters the Misses Wyett ran a seminary for young ladies - a finishing school for daughters of local gentry - in the 1880s.
The bay windows on the front of the house were removed in the 1950s in an attempt to modernise the house, along with a few other modifications. But the house now boasts a new pair of bay windows, thanks to the Fergusons' dedication to bringing it back to it's original beauty with modern details that are practical only.
"What we've basically done is take the modern stuff off that was put on in the 1900s and bought it back to how it was originally, while adding modern things like new wiring, plumbing and a state-of-the-art security system to ensure it lasts at least another 100 years," Stuart said.
"We have been totally conscious of keeping it how it should have been all along."
While they have redesigned the house inside to turn the place into a bed and breakfast with two bedrooms each with an ensuite and a two-bedroom cottage out the back that was built in the 1980s, the floor plan has remained the same and all of the joinery that did not fall apart from rot when it was removed was reused.
"The extension on the back of the house was so bent, twisted and rotten that we just pulled it down and built it again on the exact same floor plan," Stuart said.
"We reused all the joinery we could, although some of it fell apart when we removed it, and even some of the things we weren't expecting to fall apart fell apart, but where possible we used the old stuff, and we made the new stuff look as close to the original as possible."
Thanks to Carmel's interior and furniture design business, the inside of the house harks back to the days of wing back chairs and polished wood tables, but in no way does it look like your nana's house - the right words would be not old or new, but modern vintage, mixing pastel hues with strong dark wood.
It boasts couches with huge soft pillows that look like the most comfortable pillows in the world; a long wooden dining table meant for dinner parties that go long into the night; a drawing room with a built-in bookcase lining one wall filled with a good novel for every taste, topped off with a library ladder; a big cook's dream white kitchen with glassed cabinets on the walls. The list goes on.
The renovations started on October 7, 2010, and the Fergusons have already had people stay, receiving just the response they had hoped for.
"We have smartened the place up to our level of expectation - you know, the way we expect places to be when we stay somewhere and our expectations are pretty high," Stuart said.
"We've had people stay and the response has been as we hoped - they're coming back - so that's the most positive response we could have hoped for."
After more than a year of renovations, the Fergusons still have more plans for the place, such as a pergola for the cottage, a deck for the side of the house and landscaping, but the stress that generally comes with renovating a house has done little to lessen their passion for the place they call home.