Client Journey: Shelly & Stevo’s Downsizing Adventure

Rolleston to Wanaka — a custom Toroa XL, two bedrooms

Five days from the first phone call to a signed contract. Then, halfway through the build, they handed over the keys to their family home.

Who Shelly and Stevo are

Steve — Stevo to everyone — rang us in the middle of January 2026. He and Shelly were living in Rolleston, and what they wanted was clear enough to describe in a sentence: a tiny house that fitted the two of them comfortably, with an extra room for a child or a visitor.

That is a more common brief than people realise, and it is one of the harder ones to answer well, because "comfortable for two plus one" sits right on the line between several of our designs.

What they decided

So we laid the whole range out for them in one email on the day of that first call. The Toroa XL, double storey on a 12x3 platform, designed for three bedrooms but often reduced to two — which buys you a lot of downstairs. The Toroa, same idea on 10x3. The Kaka, with the bedroom, bathroom, lounge and dining downstairs and a big upstairs room that can be storage, an office, a guest space or all three. The single-storey options — the Little Ruru, the Kiwi and the Kea — and the difference between a mono-pitch roof and a gable.

No pressure and no favourite. Just the trade-offs, written plainly, so they could work it out themselves.

They had a Zoom consultation on the Sunday, and by Tuesday 20 January they had signed. Five days from first phone call to welcome email. Their onboarding meeting was the next morning.

They chose the Toroa XL and reduced it to two bedrooms — the reasoning they had started with, applied.

The design

Shelly ran the selections, and she ran them properly. Her replies came back with every answer written in blue underneath our questions: white V-groove ply lining, half-storage stairs, a black balustrade, a custom window schedule, a custom galley kitchen, a bifolding window in the end wall, a purpose-built inbuilt couch.

When she did not understand something she said so and asked for an explanation rather than guessing, which is exactly what you want and almost nobody does.

They were also hunting for a site while all this was happening. We sent them our land lease flyer template so they could advertise themselves to landowners directly, the same approach that has worked for other clients.

The middle bit that nobody talks about

Their build ran through February, March and April 2026. Quickly, and without drama.

But there is a gap in every one of these projects that we do not talk about enough: the stretch where you have left one home and not yet arrived at the next. For Shelly and Stevo that meant packing up and handing over their family home in Rolleston while their new one was still a shell with scaffolding around it.

On the Friday after they moved out, Kim's weekly photos landed — stairs complete, balustrade nearly there, plumbing fitted off, shower and toilet in, vinyl down, carpet going in.

"OMGosh Kim! It's looking gorgeous. The last couple of weeks have been challenging, especially packing up and handing over our family home in Rolleston. Seeing this coming together today is a really bright little lift." — Shelly, April 2026

We send those photos every Friday to every client. We think of it as keeping people informed. That email was a reminder that for some people, in some weeks, it is doing considerably more than that.

Where it is at

In April, with the home nearly finished, we asked whether we could show it at an open yard before it went south. Stevo's reply was four words: "No issues — happy to help."

Their Toroa XL was handed over in May and went to Wanaka, where they connected into services on a property available to them there. Stevo did his own research on the connections and asked us for anything we could add, which is the right way round.

What this taught Ruru

Two things.

Give people the honest comparison up front, including the designs that are cheaper than the one they will probably choose. Shelly and Stevo signed in five days because nothing was being sold to them — they were handed the trade-offs and trusted to decide. Fast decisions come from clarity, not from pressure.

And the Friday photos are not admin. Somewhere in every build there is a week where a client has handed back the keys to the place their family grew up in and is living out of boxes waiting for us. The photo of their stairs going in is the only evidence they have that the next part is real.

We will keep sending them.

Between homes, or about to be? Tell us. It changes how we schedule, and it changes what we send you.