Main Ensuite Week: One House Has No Tiles, One Wife Vanishes for Eight Hours, One Couple Wins by Half a Point

Right, Let’s Set the Scene

Main ensuite week on The Block. A room that matters. A room that will, in theory, help sell a house for approximately the GDP of a small Pacific nation. A room that four out of five teams treated like an optional side quest they’d get to eventually, between breakfast, crying, and arguing about grout colour.

We open on Scott Cam being “genuinely excited” about a second wet area, which is either the most dad thing ever said on Australian television or a deeply concerning window into what retirement does to a person. Either way, here we are. Tiles. Dreams. Tragedy. Let’s go.

Final Score Card

Rank	Team	Score	Judges’ Verdict
🥇 1st	Courtney & Grant	28	“It’s, like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”
🥈 2nd	Jesse & Paige	27.5	First perfect 10 of the series
🥉 3rd	Kylie & Brad	23	“That’s a big, big tick”, then told to drop the Art Deco
4th	Kristian & Mimi	21.5	“I’ve never seen such a big, useless shower”
5th	Ricky & Haydn	4	“The most unfinished room in Block history”

Half a point. That’s the entire margin between first and second, which means Courtney and Grant are currently the proud owners of a bathroom win decided by roughly the width of a grout line. Here’s how they got there.

Ricky and Haydn: The Concrete Floor Experience

Let’s start with the most spectacular implosion, because frankly it deserves top billing. Ricky and Haydn’s ensuite, at 26 hours out from reveal, contains exactly the following: a swept concrete floor, some Truecore steel framing, and the faint spiritual residue of better intentions. No waterproofing. No tiles. No tiler, because he’s flown home to a music event mid-shift and left an apprentice in charge. “Not even waterproofing, let alone a tile”, those are Shaynna’s words, and they land like a wet towel to the face.

The backstory is Shakespearean in its tragedy and also its stupidity. The primer wasn’t suitable for the flooring product. The waterproofing wouldn’t stick to the poly. The whole thing had to be ripped out, twice. “What could go wrong?” Haydn had said earlier, with the confidence of a man who has never met a bathroom. “Nothing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing could go wrong. Well, everything went wrong.”

Enter: Duncan. New builder. Airlifted in, and we mean actually airlifted, helicopter drop-off, full Creedence Clearwater Revival cinematic energy, to assess the wreckage and deliver the verdict everyone already knew. You’re not finishing. You’re out of the running. Scott Cam notes he hasn’t picked up a builder from a direct helicopter drop-off in a while. Ricky compares it to doing an injury before the grand final, which is genuinely heartbreaking and also the perfect metaphor for a show that is, at its core, construction and sport and suffering in equal parts.

“I’ve wanted to win a bathroom and ensuite on The Block my whole life and now I can’t even compete, so it sucks. It’s like doing an injury and not being able to play in the granny or something.”

The judges walk in to find the freshly swept concrete floor and collectively do the face. You know the face. It is, Darren confirms, “the most unfinished room in Block history.” The bar for Block history moments keeps getting lower and yet somehow higher at the same time.

Mimi’s Eight-Hour “Half-Hour Nap”

Meanwhile, over at Kristian and Mimi’s, we are witnessing something that will be studied in couples counselling textbooks for decades. Mimi, riding a high after a big comeback earlier in the day, decides at 8:15pm on Saturday night that she needs a quick dinner-and-drink break before getting back into it.

She resurfaces at 4:30am.

“4:30 in the morning, out comes Mimi. Resurrected. From the wine fridge.”

Kristian, to his absolute credit and also his total psychological damage, kept grouting alone through the night, texting increasingly plaintive check-ins into the void. “Mimi! We’ve got a house to do!” he yelled at 8:45pm. “Yes! I’m doing it!” she called back, from a sofa she would not leave for another eight hours. Big miracle, he’d said, earlier that morning. Big miracle. He got a big miracle alright, the miracle was that Kristian didn’t lose his actual mind.

“No-one’s the master of me, baby, so this is the main… the main bedroom ensuite.”

That last one, incidentally, wasn’t about Mimi, it was Shaynna and Darren agreeing, on air, that “master ensuite” is due for retirement in favour of “main ensuite,” which the judges promptly and unilaterally enforced for the rest of the season. Democracy in action.

Brad and the 20mm Problem

Kylie and Brad were, relative to everyone else, fine. Which on The Block means something went wrong but not catastrophically wrong. Brad measured the shower screen opening plaster-to-plaster. Brad is, by trade, a person who should know better. Brad forgot to account for the thickness of the tiles going on each side, plus the glue underneath. The opening came in 20mm too big.

“I was 15mm too big. I’ve never had that problem before,” Brad said, and everyone watching at home simultaneously winced in sympathy while making a mental note to always account for tile glue thickness. Kylie, bless her, was philosophical about it, no blow-up, no “how could you,” just a resigned “don’t worry” and a plastic chair wheeled in for reveal day because, as she put it, “it’s part of the styling now.” They’re sticking with their black-and-white direction, pairing it back with a timber vanity and white marble tiles, and playing the long game. Annoying, but fair.

Grant’s Shower Screen Gamble

Grant sent Betsy’s Glass the overall dimension of the room. Just the room dimension. No design breakdown, no panel spec, no layout signed off. Just vibes and a number. And then acted surprised when the panels came back non-compliant and Courtney’s sizeable husband couldn’t fit through the gap. Scott Cam delivered the verdict with the exhausted patience of a man who has watched this exact thing happen seventeen seasons in a row: “Grant’s just given the overall dimension of the room, sent it to Betsy’s and just hoped for the best, with no design or anything, so that’s his fault.”

“Manufacturer mis… miscalculations. We gave them 620, they gave us 520.”

To be fair to Grant: he and Courtney were so far ahead elsewhere that this was a speedbump, not a catastrophe. Their travertine chequerboard tiles, Venetian plaster walls and 60mm stone bench stopped every judge dead in their tracks. Marty compared it to a six-star hotel in Europe and said he’d be taking the palette home with him in his happy memories for the rest of the day, which is either the nicest or strangest thing a judge has said about a bathroom this season.

“Say you’ve got a wife with expensive taste without saying it, alright? Venetian plaster, marble, 60mm stone… Travertine…”

The Venetian plaster alone is doing heavy lifting. That chalky, layered, Old World texture against travertine chequerboard is the kind of combination that makes design people put their hand on their chest and breathe slowly. Courtney and Grant, who spent the morning chill and confident while everyone else was spiralling, had every right to be.

Jesse and Paige: Absolutely Living Their Best Life

And then there’s Jesse and Paige, who had finished tiling by lunchtime Saturday, were watching the AFL on their whiteboard-mounted TV, and were eating cheese and quince paste with Foreman Dan like it was a dinner party. “Biscuits, footy. It’s what Saturdays are about.” These two went into the week with a disagreement about floor-to-ceiling tiles, Paige hated it, Jesse locked it in, Paige conceded, loudly, on camera, and came out the other side with the first perfect ten of the season.

The first ten. Of the entire series. From Darren Palmer, a man who does not hand these out like show bags. Marty called the room something you’d find in a six-star hotel anywhere in the world. Shaynna said she was proud of them. It was one of those rare Block moments where the room actually earns the emotion. Paige, watching the ten go up: “What?” Same, Paige. Same.

How It All Wrapped Up

Jesse and Paige: eating biscuits, watching footy, collecting tens. Courtney and Grant: Venetian plaster royalty, one rogue shower screen dimension aside. Kylie and Brad: keeping their heads down, copping the judge criticism, doing it their way anyway. Kristian and Mimi: survived on faith, grouting, and Kristian’s supernatural patience. Ricky and Haydn: a concrete floor, a helicopter builder, and the kind of heartbreak only The Block can manufacture. Next week, someone will measure something wrong again. Someone will cry in a corridor. And we will watch every second of it.

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