We booked a single night at Kim’s Te Horo Country Cottage, our aim was to get away for the night in order to have a break from the continuous cleaning in our our home due to ongoing renovations.
The area is quiet and the gardens and surrounding paddocks are lovely; they teaming with wildlife such as Pukeko’s and other birds along with their farms animals such chickens, goats and cows.
We arrived on the 28th December, understandably families are busy over this period and so we never got a chance to meet Kim or anyone else. The directions to the cottage and where to park were clear and helpful.
We were looking very much forward to the stay, some time away from home where we could relax and not have moving boxes surrounding us and having to mop the floors and clean down surfaces multiple times a day due to tradesmen in and out the place.
Sadly we were disappointed with our stay, mainly around the overall cleanliness of the place. We struggled on what to mention in our review since we very much understand the impact reviews have and also felt we should take into consideration the time of year however despite taking some time out to reflect before writing we felt it was important to call out the issues so that they could be understood by our host and addressed for future guests.
The place was tidy but there were certain areas that needed greater attention around cleaning;
bathroom - there were dead insects and dried flower leafs in the sink, an old discoloured and cracked soap bar, hairs on the toilet seat and in the shower along with a towel that not only looked very old but was full of long hairs.
Living room work bench - surface not wiped down with toast crumbs visible across the top.
The shallow mantle above the head of the bed had not been dusted.
Skirting’s boards around entire place were dirty, particularly at the door area. There were also many dead spiders/flies on the floor around the skirting areas.
Windows and frames needed cleaned, both inside and outside.
Entrance - the mat and surrounding pathway were covered in chicken poop although I do understand this is a farm environment and the host was not present to clean immediately beforehand so this I will forgive.
The bed was noisy; the area is quiet but every time one of us moved in our sleep it woke the other person up.
We considered just leaving and heading home but having driven 1.5hrs decided to head to a nearby town where we bought cleaning materials and set about giving the bathroom and workbench a clean. To b e fair, had we looked in the cupboard we would have found cleaning materials but we were more concerned about cleaning then looking through the cupboards at the time.
It would not take much effort to clean things up better and put the effort to give a final check to things before a guest arrived. Had this been done then I would not have much to fault since the area is lovely and the place itself it laid out well and is very spacious.
We took photographs of most things that we had concerns with so happy to share with the host if they disagreed with our comments.