The Block 2026, Episode 38: Big Deck Energy, a $50,000 Bailout and a Barrow Blockade

Nine weeks of staring at skirting boards, and the Blockheads finally get to stare at dirt. Week ten kicks off the outdoor terraces and pools, with roughly 100 square metres to play with for the uptown houses and double that for Houses Four and Five, plus an alarming amount of decking to screw down by Saturday. “Big deck energy” was the phrase of the night, and if you had “big deck energy” on your bingo card, congratulations, you are the show’s target market.

The first question of any landscaping week is money, and the answer for most of the street was “none”. Lisa and Rosco opened the week with $4,476 in the bank and no landscaper on site, while Rick and Tayla reckoned they had enough to finish the week, “and then maybe half for next week”, with their landscaper Chris eyeing the exit. Then Scott Cam walked in with a CommBank Yellow Week surprise: $50,000 to every team, on the spot. The reaction was instant. “Honestly, without it, we’d be delivering some mud,” said one relieved contestant, while another worked out they had “pulled up 100 grand in the space of 24 hours”. For House Four, it landed at an almost comic moment: Sev had just pulled Courtney into the garage to confess she had absorbed $40,000 of their $50,000 prize on Venetian plastering “and stuff”, leaving them around $60,000 for three weeks. The next scene opens with another 50 grand.

The people who needed it least were, naturally, the ones who already had it. Adam and Jolene were reminded of their kitchen week windfall (including $60,000 of Dekton from Cosentino and $10,000 from Arnott’s), which leaves House One with $160,000 for the next three weeks and a plan to match: an outdoor kitchen with barbecue, pizza oven and a massive island bench, a plunge pool, and a sauna on the upstairs alfresco. Their landscaper is Mornington Peninsula local Brody Young, a Block first-timer who, the narrator helpfully noted, was also on Big Brother Australia back in 2002. Meanwhile, Courtney and Sev were collecting their winner’s getaway, a boutique stay at Cassis in Red Hill courtesy of Chery, plus $30,000 cash from Arnott’s for their three tens, with Scott’s dinner conversation turning to what the share house really thought of those scores.

Then there was the neighbourhood watch. Outdoors means neighbours, and House One and House Two are not in a sharing mood. Adam and Jolene announced they would be taping up the side access to the front yards, which means Chantel and Wyatt can only reach their front yard by barrowing through their own home or via House One’s property. Roscoe, an ally, would be allowed through; Wyatt would not. “If Wyatt wants to run a barrow through? Hell, no.” It is, to be fair, a very Block way to discover that landscaping is mostly logistics. Add a Candyman rumour that Courtney cheerfully admitted she started “to stir up” Jolene, and a $10,000 budget challenge where one contestant revealed the winning tactic is weighing grapes (then lemons, then mandarins) at the shops on Saturday afternoon, and it is clear the outdoor weeks will be just as petty as the indoor ones, only with better lighting.

The night closed with the Blockheads back at school for an athletics carnival at Toorak College, where a surprise visit from their families had most of the street in tears. Tomorrow night, Hamish Blake arrives as the substitute PE teacher, in what has been promised as very short red shorts. Somewhere in the middle of all that, there are still three weeks of landscaping to finish.