If Monday belonged to insulation and dining tables, Tuesday of living, dining and alfresco week belongs to one word: fireplace. Every house with a hearth on its plans spent the day fighting clearances, flues and box gutters, and by the end of it, at least one Blockhead sounded ready to torch the whole idea and start again.
Key Moments Today
- DISASTERRick and Tayla’s fireplace hits design number three or four for the week, still unresolved by the box gutter and flue clearances come episode’s end. “I’m done with it at this point,” Rick said.
- ARGUMENTChantel confronts Wyatt over a lounge room bulkhead built 150mm too low while she was out, a $1,000 fix that costs four to six hours: “You can’t just pass the baton over to me.”
- DRAMAAt Christian Cole’s Coburg workshop, Adam and Jolene learn Courtney and Sev’s original table booking fell through over budget: “It was your lucky day.”
- RIDICULOUS PURCHASEThe Cursio brothers, sick of handing out free favours all season, start charging $500 to $1,000 a house for paving tutorials, backed by a cheeky “Cursio Brothers Tutorials, $9.99, no labour included” sign.
- DRAMASite manager Dan gets pulled off site mid-handover when his wife Dani goes into labour a full week early, calling back “Don’t worry about the fireplace. Don’t worry about the barbecues, mate,” as he heads off on paternity leave.
The day opened on a lighter note: Rick turned 63, marked with a birthday cake, well-wishing signs strung across the Mount Eliza bridge, and later an impromptu barbecue thrown by Scott Cam himself, complete with a speech, a genuinely emotional moment from Rick (“had a bit of sand in my eye”), and a birthday roast about looking “not a day over 35.” There was good news on House One’s front too: their plasterer, hospitalised the day before with an elevated heart rate, returned with a clean bill of health and a one-liner for the ages: “Not even hospital will keep me away.”
Elsewhere, Lisa and Rosco tried a role swap, with Rosco heading offsite for consults and Lisa left running the site. It did not go well. Between her own fireplace hitting the exact same clearance and box-gutter problems as Rick and Tayla’s, and a barbecue saga that dragged on for most of the day before finally getting approved in principle, Lisa declared it “the worst day ever” and vowed never to let Rosco leave again. Weather isn’t helping anyone’s mood either: Friday’s forecast of rain and winds up to 36km/h has Adam and Jolene nervous about craning their custom Christian Cole table and an enormous mirror into a first-floor space in a stiff breeze.
Speaking of that table: Adam and Jolene took a field trip to Christian Cole’s workshop in Coburg to watch their bespoke ten-seat piece take shape, hand-carved from timber salvaged out of the 2019 bushfires in Man From Snowy River country. Christian let slip that Courtney and Sev had actually booked him first, before the show even started, but missed out when their budget didn’t stretch far enough, handing Adam and Jolene the slot instead. Just don’t ask Jolene to describe it: “Do the photos do it justice? No,” was as far as Adam got before he told her to touch the timber herself.
The day closed on a genuine surprise. With handover notes barely written, site manager Dan revealed his wife Dani had gone into labour a full week early, sending him off on paternity leave mid-sentence. “Don’t worry about the fireplace. Don’t worry about the barbecues, mate,” he called back as he left, to a chorus of Blockhead well-wishes that briefly made everyone forget about flue clearances entirely.
Fireplaces, bulkheads, and one dramatic exit down. We’ll see how much of it gets sorted before the weekend’s rain and wind roll in.
