Courtney and Grant Score a $30K Night as a Banned Benchtop Sinks Maddy and Charlotte

Right, Let’s Set the Scene

Backyard Week has officially wrapped, which means five exhausted couples have spent seven days wrangling turf rolls, pool pumps, mystery tradies and enough Freedom furniture to bankrupt a small nation, all while Scott Cam wanders around like a school principal counting how many trucks are blocking the driveway. This week wasn’t just about who could lay the prettiest lawn, it was about who could survive it. Deliveries got stuck in traffic jams of their own making, plants that were “definitely sorted” turned out to be very much not sorted, and at least one team discovered, live on set, that their brand-new benchtop was made of an illegal substance.

There was also a Ford Mustang Mach-E dangled in front of everyone for next week’s Facade challenge, which is the kind of carrot that makes grown adults cry over steel edging at 5:30pm on a Saturday. But that’s next week’s problem. Tonight it was $10,000 from Ford, forty points up for grabs (yes, forty, landscaping guru Dave Franklin joined the judging panel, because apparently four judges weren’t enough chaos already), and a scoreline that ended up separating the field by twelve brutal points.

Final Score Card

Rank	Team	Score	Judges’ Verdict
🥇 1st	Courtney & Grant (House 2)	39/40	“It’s miraculous that it’s this good in this time frame. Like, mind blowing.”, Darren
🥈 2nd	Maddy & Charlotte (House 1)	37/40	“Design. Planning. Finish. Amenity. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.”, Darren
🥉 3rd	Kristian & Mimi (House 5)	35/40	“As soon as you walk in, you’re drawn to it. It does scream resort.”, Shaynna
4th	Ricky & Haydn (House 3)	32/40	“It ticks so many great boxes. It just doesn’t have the finesse and the finishings.”, Shaynna
5th	Kylie & Brad (House 4)	27/40	“What we’re seeing is a really poorly planned, uninviting space.”, Darren

Courtney and Grant walked away with two perfect 10s (from Darren and Shaynna) for a barbeque zone Shaynna reckoned was “the hook for your campaign,” turning $10,000 from Ford into a $30,000 night once the Arnott’s bonus for the double ten got added on. Maddy and Charlotte were genuinely in the box seat for the win right up until the judges clocked the eight timber posts near their pool, a two-point gap in the end, and you can bet the missing benchtop haunted them more than they’ll admit. Down the other end, Kylie and Brad’s 27 wasn’t just last, it was a full twelve points adrift of the winners, and the judges didn’t sugar-coat why.

Maddy and Charlotte: The Great Caesarstone Catastrophe

House One had the whole package going for it, a half basketball court, a mezzanine spiral staircase (paid for with a Hipages lever pull), a fire pit, pizza oven, and a genuinely gasp-worthy 448 square metres to play with. Then, at around 5:30pm on Saturday with tools-down bearing down on them, Dan and Simmo strolled over to inspect the freshly installed outdoor kitchen benchtop and delivered the kind of sentence that ends careers: “It’s a banned product.”

Turns out the discount Caesarstone slab Charlotte had driven four hours round trip to collect (for a fifth of the quoted $6,000 price, no less) contained roughly 70% silica, banned outright in Australia. No benchtop, no time to properly tile a replacement, and a Ryan-led crew scrambling to jam in a plywood filler just so the space wasn’t presenting completely bare.

“I don’t even know how the girls got it here.”

Somehow, it barely mattered. The judges walked in and lost their minds over everything else, the size, the curves, the fire pit, the private wine nook off the main suite, and especially that spiral staircase leading to a self-contained kids’ zone with its own basketball court. Darren’s verdict was as close to a standing ovation as this show gets.

“Design. Planning. Finish. Amenity. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.”

A silver medal 37 points, and honestly, given the disaster that unfolded hours before the reveal, that’s a minor miracle.

Courtney and Grant: Two Tens and a $30K Night

House Two came into the week “very chilled”, their words, repeated so often it started sounding like a mantra to ward off disaster, and somehow that energy held right through to the reveal, despite the standard on-camera bickering over a pressure washer that nearly ended in bloodshed. Courtney and Grant crammed five separate entertaining zones into their 403 square metre yard: a fire pit, dining table, main-deck lounge, a second seating suite off the bedrooms, and still enough lawn left over for the kids to run amok.

“Courtney, get the (BLEEP) off the pavement.” “Shut up!”

Judges walked in through drizzling rain and still lost it over the outdoor kitchen, “barbeque of dreams,” according to Shaynna, plus olive, lemon and bay leaf trees dotted around it that had Dave Franklin practically drooling. Marty Fox called the indoor-outdoor flow the actual hook of the whole campaign.

“This is what people pay for. This is what gets them emotionally connected to a property.”

Marty’s one gripe, eight bare timber posts along the pool walkway looking “unfinished”, got shut down by Dave Franklin, who reckoned it was intentional garden art. Between two perfect 10s from Darren and Shaynna, the win, the $10,000 Ford cheque and a bonus $20,000 from Arnott’s for the double-ten, Grant’s exact reaction summed it up nicely: “Holy (BLEEP)!”

Ricky and Haydn: The DIY Backyard Nobody Knew Was DIY

House Three rolled into Backyard Week with what Scott Cam cheekily called “R&H Landscaping”, a “gun team” who, it turns out, had never actually landscaped anything before in their lives, because there was no landscaper. It was just Ricky, Haydn and their mate Duncan, going in raw on the second-biggest yard of the season, complete with a hand-built swing set made from spotted gum so heavy it nearly broke their drill.

The judges were floored the moment they walked in, Dave Franklin’s opening line was simply “This is a backyard,” which is the landscaping equivalent of a mic drop. Then they found out there was no professional behind it and had to pick their jaws up off the buffalo turf.

“They did not have a landscaper, from memory… they’ve done it themselves with Duncan.”

Shaynna wasn’t fully sold, wanting more layers and shape rather than a straight Corten steel line with “everything chucked on the sides”, and Darren pointed out that if you’re skimping on landscaping to focus on carpentry, the deck battens shouldn’t be visible underneath. But then the group turned the corner into the pool zone, complete with an Italian mosaic tile feature and the biggest pool area seen all day, and Shaynna was apologising mid-sentence.

“It ticks so many great boxes. It just doesn’t have the finesse and the finishings. If they had a professional landscaper, they would have sold the dream more.”

A respectable 32 points for a couple of amateurs and a bloke named Duncan, genuinely one of the wilder underdog stories of the season.

Kylie and Brad: When “It Is What It Is” Becomes a Personality

House Four never really got out of the hole. Smallest backyard on the block at 378 square metres, and still they managed to fall so far behind that Scott Cam’s simple question, “What’s happening with your landscaping?”, was met with actual crickets chirping on the soundtrack, followed by “I don’t know what’s happening” and “Not much.” Turns out carpenter Clay had told the plant supplier things were “sorted” without ever placing the order, leaving Kylie and Brad staring down 890 kilos of unplaced steel edging with no plan for where it would go.

Enter Troy, from rival team R&H’s own landscaping crew, who felt so sorry for them he showed up unasked with half a dozen wheelbarrows and knocked over a full day’s worth of turf-laying in under two hours. Genuinely one of the nicest things anyone’s done on this show all season, and Kylie and Brad still couldn’t fully claw it back.

“No offence, but it’s just landscaping.” “I was going to say it just has given me absolutely nothing.”

The judges tore into the wasted space, the fake pool tiles Darren said were “killing every other stonemason in Australia,” and pool equipment left in plain view of the main bedroom windows. Shaynna, never one to hold back, went for the emotional jugular.

“There’s nothing about this that says come and hang in my backyard.”

Twenty-seven points, dead last, and a full twelve-point gap to the winners. Even the judges softened at the end, conceding the house is still gorgeous and wouldn’t put a buyer off, small comfort when you’re propping up the leaderboard with one week to go.

Kristian and Mimi: Resort Vibes, Rum Boats, and a Concert Alibi

House Five had the biggest backyard of the entire season at 552 square metres, and Kristian and Mimi treated it like a personal Bunnings-meets-Camerich shopping spree, eight of these, four of those, “I just love spending other people’s money,” Mimi cheerfully admitted. Somewhere in the chaos she also vanished for most of Saturday to attend a kids’ Disney and Nickelodeon concert and didn’t resurface on site until midday, prompting a very pointed “And where were you on Saturday, Mimi?” that she answered with visible amusement rather than shame.

Somehow it all came together anyway. The judges were stopped in their tracks by mosaic tiling around the pool, rope-wrapped timber piers straight out of a Phillip Island postcard, and, the pièce de résistance, an actual boat repurposed as a bar and stocked with rum.

“As soon as you walk in, you’re drawn to it. It does scream resort.”

Not everything landed clean, though, the judges revisited an old gripe about the TV room having zero flow to the pool area, and were baffled to find the couple’s brand-new Wolf barbeque banished upstairs to a balcony instead of servicing the outdoor dining space. “Un-Australian,” as Marty put it, only half joking.

“This has zero connection to lifestyle outside.”

Still, a strong bronze on 35 points for the biggest yard on the island, a boat full of rum, and one genuinely excellent alibi for missing pre-start.

How It All Wrapped Up

Courtney and Grant rode two perfect 10s and an entertainer’s dream barbeque zone to a runaway 39-point win and a $30,000 night. Maddy and Charlotte survived a genuine benchtop catastrophe to still land silver on 37, thanks to a spiral staircase and a kids’ zone that had judges tripping over their own compliments. Kristian and Mimi turned the biggest backyard on the block into a resort-meets-pirate-bar fantasy for a solid third on 35, concert absence and all. Ricky and Haydn proved you don’t need a professional landscaper to earn a genuine “This is a backyard” from the toughest judge in the room, landing fourth on 32. And Kylie and Brad, undone by a mate’s dropped ball on plant orders and rescued only by a rival team’s kindness, finished a distant last on 27, twelve points off the pace with one brutal week left to claw it back.

Grab a coffee, get comfortable, and we’ll see you back here for the next disaster.