Wednesday of Domain week opened with a photo shoot nobody felt ready for, a $110,000 prize pool nobody could quite believe, and a retaliatory fridge note nobody was willing to own up to first. Between the Domain listing photographers, a Matterport crew building 3D virtual tours, and a live plumbing emergency, it was the kind of day that made “just finish the kids’ bedroom” look like the easy part of the week.
The maths alone explains the panic: $50,000 for winning Thursday night’s buyers jury, $20,000 for this week’s room win, $10,000 for best budget and a further $30,000 sitting there for anyone who lands a perfect score. That’s $110,000 on the table, and every team still has a kids’ bedroom, a redo room, and a house full of construction dust to hide before 100 strangers walk through the door.
Overnight, the dishwashing note war from Monday finally got its punchline. Jolene’s passive-aggressive reminder to wash up got a reply pinned to House Two’s fridge reading “eat my arse,” and by Tuesday morning Chantel was working the staircase like a detective, stopping everyone on the way down to ask “did you write the note?” Adam took the fall for Jolene before she eventually owned up herself, and the fallout spilled sideways: Chantel let slip to Courtney and Sev exactly what had been said about their room at Monday’s dinner, which sent Sev straight to Lisa for a very direct conversation. “You guys were super bitchy, ripping us and our room apart,” Sev told her, and while the pair worked it out by the end of the day, calling it “water under a bridge,” the group chat has clearly seen better weeks.
Out on site, House Four’s redo room kept fuelling its own controversy. Courtney and Sev are installing a bronze-tinted, panelled mirror wall that looks a great deal like the one Adam and Jolene debuted back in week five, and this time Courtney addressed it head-on to camera: “I’d like to say that we’re not copying House One. I see it as inspiration, because I’m pretty sure Jolene was inspired by something she saw on Pinterest, so she’s not the first person to do a mirror wall.” Diplomatic, and not exactly a denial.
House Five had the day’s real scare when chippy Mitchell accidentally cut a hole straight through a water pipe, sending Tayla into a full “Water! Water! Water!” panic before Lachie from All Out Plumbing sprinted in and found a stop tap nobody even knew existed. A quick mop-up later and the flooring survived unscathed. Elsewhere, the Melbourne Storm turned up for an Arnott’s Shapes ball-throwing challenge that had grown adults practising their NRL torpedo passes into a garbage bin; Courtney and Sev’s team took the $5,000 team prize (Courtney’s stated strategy: “just thrusting”), while House Two’s chippy Nathaniel won the $2,000 tradie belt in a decider against House Five’s Mitchell. Foreman Dan, unmoved by all of it, shut down at least one team’s plan to sneak buyers in through the back door instead of a garage full of clutter.
Key Moments Today
- DRAMASev confronts Lisa face to face over comments made about House Four’s room at Monday’s dinner: “You guys were super bitchy, ripping us and our room apart.”
- ARGUMENTThe dishwashing note war escalates: a reply reading “eat my arse” appears on House Two’s fridge, and Chantel interrogates the whole house on the stairs the next morning.
- DISASTERA chippy’s accidental hole in a water pipe sends House Five into a full “Water! Water! Water!” panic before a hero plumber finds the hidden stop tap.
- DRAMACourtney addresses the House One mirror wall comparison head-on: “I see it as inspiration,” she says, without quite saying it isn’t a copy.
Thursday night is when all of it gets marked for real, by 100 strangers with a vote each and no interest in who wrote which note. Until then, it’s photographers, Matterport scans, and a house full of teams hoping the paint dries before the doorbell rings.
