Main ensuite week ended the way it built: two rooms finished, two rooms not, and a scoreline so tight it came down to a gnome someone won for building a dog kennel three days earlier. By the time Scott Cam read out the placings, one team had their first win of the season, one team had technically out-scored them and lost anyway, and two more were staring down a second unfinished bathroom in three weeks.
| Rank | Team | Score | Judges’ verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Rick and Tayla | 26 | “It’s the Goldilocks of everything we’ve seen today.” |
| 2nd | Chantel and Wyatt | 25.5 | “It’s so marketable, but it’s really predictable.” |
| 3rd | Courtney and Sev | 25 | “This could have been a ten, but those functional elements drag it down.” |
| 4th | Adam and Jolene | 21 | “Not finished, but pretty.” |
| 5th | Lisa and Rosco | 20.5 | “Too many heroes in a room, and you can come unstuck.” |
Key Moments This Episode
- DRAMARick and Tayla claim their first win of the season, 26 points to Chantel and Wyatt’s 25.5, the margin supplied entirely by the bonus-point gnome they’d won building a dog kennel days earlier.
- ARGUMENTDarren Palmer confronts Courtney and Sev over their spending: “How are you going to get to the end of this competition if you are spending like this, girls?”
- DISASTERAdam and Jolene sack their tiler and briefly throw in the towel on the whole room, before a last-minute deal for the Cursio brothers drags them back into contention, still unfinished on reveal day.
- DISASTERLisa and Rosco’s faux crazy-paved floor draws the harshest line of the night from Shaynna: “Very Flintstone-y,” while Marty says it looks “like the kids came in and threw a lot of things at the wall.”
- RIDICULOUS PURCHASECourtney and Sev’s built-in shower love seat gets torn apart by Darren, who compares sitting on it to “a bus stop” and asks “why a child couch?”
- DRAMAChantel and Wyatt finish a full day early, then take home the $10,000 CommBank Best Budgeting Award for landing within $714 of their estimate, and still lose the room by half a point.
- ARGUMENTRick tries to plaster, paint and tile his own ensuite single-handed while down a plasterer, prompting Scott to warn Tayla she’s “trying to do too much again.”
Rick and Tayla, 26 points
Rick spent the week trying to be a one-man construction crew, plastering, painting and tiling while a plasterer shortage left him doing jobs Scott openly worried “is too much for one contestant.” Tayla, still smarting from the judges’ critique of her main bedroom styling, declared she was “just gonna do myself from now on” and went shopping solo down the main street of Mount Eliza rather than lean on anyone else’s taste. The pair ditched a planned bathtub for a bigger shower with two shower heads on the same wall (“so much room for activities,” Rick offered, declining to elaborate), and delivered a Roca smart toilet for the second week running.
It paid off. Marty called it “the Goldilocks of everything we’ve seen today,” loving the storage, the skylights and a stone-look tile he named his favourite of the night (Darren agreed: “these tiles are bloody beautiful”). Shaynna went further: “This is the best room you have done so far.” The only real mark against them was a Darren Palmer pet peeve, a floating vanity set too close to the basin: “That’s not a great distance between the tapware and the basin… they should have dropped the vanity by a few centimetres.” It wasn’t enough to stop 26 points, and with Rick and Tayla’s bonus-point gnome added on top, their first win of the season arrived by exactly half a point over Chantel and Wyatt.
Chantel and Wyatt, 25.5 points
Chantel and Wyatt did what Chantel and Wyatt do: finished a full day early, kept things simple, and left everyone else wondering how. “I cannot put my finger on it,” Chantel said. “Why we’re the only ones who are always so far ahead.” Their answer, this week as ever, was the Cursio brothers, their regular tilers since 2019, who had tiles laid and a bathroom essentially wrapped up while the rest of the street was still finding its feet. It earned them the $10,000 CommBank Best Budgeting Award for landing within $714 of their estimate.
The judges loved the execution and hated the safety of it in equal measure. Marty said it “looks like they finished it with military precision, because it is spotless,” and defended their consistency as smart, marketable design. Shaynna wasn’t as convinced: “I don’t love that we only have mirrors stuck to the wall… it’s not high end,” and later, more bluntly, “honestly, I have seen a million of these bathrooms.” It’s so marketable, but it’s really predictable,” was the verdict that stuck. A 25.5 was a very good score. It was also, thanks to a rival team’s gnome, not quite good enough.
Courtney and Sev, 25 points
After a week that had Courtney in tears and off her feet (“sleep, and vomit” was her honest answer when asked what she wanted to do that morning), the room that finally came together was, by the judges’ own admission, nearly perfect. Darren called the finish “back on course,” loving the same Beaumont Oyster Taj Mahal tile that won them their kitchen, and Shaynna said it could “easily have been a ten out of ten room… this is probably the most emotive that we’ve seen today, that sells the dream.”
Then came the spending lecture. Darren surveyed the marble-clad walls and asked outright, “How are you going to get to the end of this competition if you are spending like this, girls?” before landing the real note: “It’s not spending the money on a feature that’s the problem. It’s overusing the feature, and that’s wasting budget.” The built-in shower love seat, Courtney’s hero piece, fared even worse. “Why a child couch? You didn’t have enough space for this to make sense,” Darren said, comparing the experience to sitting at a bus stop. It cost them a possible ten. A 25 was still good enough for third.
Adam and Jolene, 21 points
This one nearly didn’t happen at all. Mid-week, after a tiler who’d spent nearly eight hours on site laying a single tile, Adam and Jolene sacked the crew and effectively withdrew, spending a day cycling and cooking instead of building. “We’re going to walk away from the bathroom,” Jolene said. “Every time I think about the bathroom, I get upset.” It took a McCafe car park negotiation with Wyatt for the Cursio brothers, borrowed for the second time this season, to talk them back into the race.
They still didn’t get there. “Not finished, but pretty,” was Shaynna’s verdict walking in, and the room itself scored well on paper: Darren called the layout “so perfectly satisfying,” and Marty said “you open that door, the shot will draw buyers in… this is selling the dream,” rating it a potential contender for the day, if only it had been finished. It wasn’t, and 21 points reflected a room that impressed everyone it couldn’t quite convince to forget it was incomplete.
Lisa and Rosco, 20.5 points
Lisa and Rosco’s week was defined by the arched shower door that arrived in completely the wrong size and a faux crazy-paved floor that took an intricate, time-consuming pattern to lay properly, on top of a nib wall built to the wrong height. “We just felt no matter how much we said something to the tilers, they just didn’t hook in,” Lisa said. Once again, they walked into judging with a room that wasn’t finished, this time by a matter of centimetres rather than days.
The judges liked plenty of it individually, Shaynna loved the timber vanity (“this vanity is the last thing you’d expect, but I love it”) and the storage in the mirrored cabinets, but the floor undid a lot of goodwill. “Very Flintstone-y,” Shaynna said, and Marty compared the room to a toddler’s art project: “it’s like my kids have come in here and grabbed all these things and gone, ‘Pfft.’” Darren found the silver lining, pointing out that the room at least ties their whole house together into a consistent, if inconsistent-scoring, aesthetic: “House Three is definable. They know where they are. Their aesthetic is set.” A 20.5 was the week’s lowest score, but not, on this evidence, a surprising one.
“It’s the Goldilocks of everything that we’ve seen today.”
Shaynna Blaze, on Rick and Tayla’s winning main ensuite
Two rooms finished, two didn’t, and the difference between first and second came down to a gnome. Main ensuite week is done; next up is the biggest swing of the season so far, lounge, dining and al fresco, done in pairs across the next four weeks. Grab a coffee, get comfortable, and we’ll see you back here for the next disaster.
