41 Comments

  1. The house mostly turned out okay, I feel, although I still can’t reconcile these contestants with my own intense personal dislike of wallpaper.

    But that limestone wall in the kitchen? Yikes. Just, yikes. If I was the homeowners, the very first thing I’d do is tear that thing down and throw it all in the dumpster. Sorry Jared, but you should’ve given up on that by about day two. Having said that, the rest of the kitchen was beautiful.

  2. I could not live with all the different wood finishes. None of the colours/stains complement any other. Orange wood stain should just be criminalised.
    Somehow, Mel & Dave become more repulsive each episode.

  3. I really felt for Kim and Michelle not finishing, they definitely drew the short straw for for the amount of painting this week, that being said, why didn’t they hire someone to put the wallpaper up?

  4. The scoring makes no sense. I don’t understand how Lawrence and Wendy gave Kim and Michelle a 7 for an unfinished zone with that horrible hallway where they even used the timber on the ceiling that Leigh and Kristie emphatically stated they didn’t want. Then Lawrence gives Toad and Mandy the same score even though their zone was finished and fairly nice although the laundry room colors didn’t make much sense.
    It would have been easier for KM to have painted the hallway rather than put up the wallpaper.
    When Jared realized he didn’t have enough limestone he should have just pulled off what he had already put on the wall. That wall is UGLY and ruins a beautiful kitchen.
    For the most part it’s another house without flow and consistency. It may be a competition but the contestants should be working together to present a beautiful home with design flow and not a mish mash of this and that.

    • Yeah. It’s why I would really have to think long and hard before actually going on the show. These bozos (that channel 7 picks for the sake of drama, as opposed to any natural talent for interior design) are just gonna ruin your house.

      • It’s definitely an improvement over what was there but it just doesn’t gel.
        I was surprised that Wendy & Lawrence liked the draping between the ensuite and the master bedroom. It looked tacky to me.
        The vanity in the powder room looked like it belonged in the trash bin.
        I would like to know how much was spent to complete each reno.

  5. Watch the pattern of Leigh and Christie reacting to their new home.

    They walk into a room, there’s two seconds of, “Oh my God, it’s so amazing!” … followed by long monologues of, “I don’t like this or this or this or this.”

    • Pair of ungrateful bathtubs. They had their wasteland upgraded to a new home..

      Coulda spent the week off with their precious kids. No more tears.

      Not enough storage for Leigh’s colossal ego.

      • The scores are better than I thought they’d be.

        But at the end of the day, they wound up with a finished house, and they certainly didn’t have one of those before.

  6. This is a very bad floor plan. It appears there is no back door in the plan drawing. If there is a back door somewhere it is miiiles from the laundry.

  7. Something about the whole reno just seems a little bogus, though.

    Christie is so high-maintenance, but she was willing to live with Leigh in a half-finished construction site, out in the scrub, half an hour away from the nearest city? Is it me or is there something incongruous there?

  8. 925 k.
    Is someone jerkin’ our gherkins?

    Who dressed Leigh for the scoring segment? A colour blind Gorilla? That’ll teach him to complain.

  9. Wow. They got a recessed Californian toilet. I’m so jealous. They get California cool and California stool.

  10. Weird scoring again. Giving an unfinished zone a “7” and giving a finished fairly decent/nice zone the same score????? In addition Leigh didn’t like KM’s bathroom that much.
    Weird score for JJ’s zone, too. Refrigerator didn’t fit and limestone wall horrible. Safety issue with quarter pipe and lack of storage. Yet they get an 8???

    I remember when LK said they didn’t want to see a surfboard hanging on a wall but then they choose it as the winning statement piece and love it in the guest room.
    Wonder if LK have ever been to California and if they really understand California “cool”.

  11. On another note, I find looking at the relationships this season interesting. Obviously excluding KM and the boys, it seems that the fiery relationships are actually quite strong, yet I am doubting the longevity of Jared and Jess. She is reminding me of my SIL who after years of loving sweetness has just dumped on my BIL years of resentment. Jess feels a little controlling in the sweetest way, and I worry that Jared is too soft to protect himself. Toad and Mandy seem to be chalk and cheese and are just beautiful to watch in the way they have a genuine partnership. David and Chiara are so volatile and yet seem to work together okay. Leigh and Christie are well-matched in pure selfishness. Mel and Dave suit each other well, and I like the way they always treat each other with respect and speak respectfully to each other.

    I wonder where the couples will go from here? Seeing that there are quite of a lot of kids involved I hope that the nasty ones learn some adult behaviour soon. Leigh in particular needs some anger management counselling or his kids are going to have a terrible time.

    • Well Said!. I see trouble ahead for Leigh and Kristie when the little girl won’t go to bed because she wants to play in her “playroom”. There are too many distractions for a child of that age.

    • I don’t really get that vibe from Jess and Jared. Toad and Mandy are a beautiful couple who seem to respect and love each other a great deal. Mel and Dave are interesting, because they’re one of those couples that suit each other perfectly … but I’d still cross the street to avoid them. And for all the pre-show talk about David and Chiara being “married hot-heads”, their only real issue is David’s lack of emotional resilience. His only coping method seems to be swearing and storming off … but I don’t get the impression that he’s ever unkind or horrible to Chiara, it seems like he’s quite sweet and kind to her.

      And Leigh and Christie, I just don’t like them enough as people to be able to read them.

    • Jarred was in the AFL system. They can’t use the loo without being ‘managed’. He seems lost making any decision independently.

      • Sonny Bill couldn’t use a loo without getting into trouble. One time a very drunk AFL rookie yelled at me to show him my “tits”. I had very long hair and he couldn’t see me from the front. When I turned around, opened the shirt and showed him he was confused alright. He was an apprentice meathead.

  12. Leigh and Kristie should have had a sewer built for them to live in…they’re both pieces of shit.

  13. When the contestant doesn’t know the difference between a penguin and a pelican, the experts should be called. He must have loads to teach his poor children.The guy needs help.

    • I wonder about them, now that we’ve seen their house and gotten an insight into their lives.

      I get the impression that they’ve both been through financial hardship (how many times did they mention that buying the house had been an impossible dream?), and then borrowed against it, so their mortgage is currently more than the value of the house. But then we looked inside at Chiara’s shopping habits (a wardrobe literally full to bursting with clothes and shoes) while David has the treadmill in the corner as well.

      I don’t know. I just kind of get the feeling that, once they have a livable house, they’ll stay there as long as channel 7 wants them to, then sell it, and go for a bigger house, once again biting off more than they can chew financially. That’s just the impression they gave.

      • No reason for the house to be filled with so much “junk”. If they care about their kids they would have cleaned it up. Looked very unsafe inside.

  14. Gosh, Leigh and Christie are vile. Christie, you’re renovating somebody’s house. This may come as a shock … but it’s not all about *you*, sweety.

    I think you can tell that, by this point in the reno, the teams are all just getting sick of each other. Like, everybody just seems so tired of dealing with the others.

    • Just catching up now, but I realised from this episode that if we weren’t seeing Christie’s true nature from the to-camera pieces, she might come across as OK, and the feud over the wallpaper as an equal spat. Michelle showed true class in her continual attempts to find a resolution and managing to keep her temper from getting out of hand.

      When the contestants watch this back, they will realise how vindictive Christie really was, and that she was not only uncooperative, but actively trying to sabotage other people’s zones.

  15. Toad and Mandy were on fire last night, Laurence gave them a ten.

    Leigh and Christie brought the vile again.Their gold wall looked vile, too.

  16. Except for Ellie Mae’s room which was “cute” the reno was horrible. Garish and looked like a bordello for the most part rather than a family home. Again, no design flow but then these teams do not want to work together (Kim and Michelle tried and I pity them for being stuck with zones that adjoined LK’s and DM’s.) David and Chiara requested the colors that were used and wanted OTT but it could have been done more elegantly. OTT does not mean throwing more and more “stuff” into the rooms.
    The reno was definitely OTT as in Overly Tacky and Terrible

    • i thought the reno was horrible, too. What impression does one get walking into the house with that black and sparkly curtain all along the wall? There was very little about it that suited an average family home. I saw that Kim and Michelle were on Better Homes and Gardens on Friday night, having the children’s playroom redone. That possibly means that they were the first team to be eliminated.

    • I’m with you. I wasn’t a fan of the final product. I didn’t mind the major bathroom (except for the horrible red tiled wall), and the larger kitchen was nice (particularly with a big family) … but the rest of the house was horrible. Tacky and cheap, and you’re right, it looked more like a bordello than a family home. And the son’s wrestling-themed bedroom? My gosh, that looked ghastly.

      Kim and Michelle got quite whiny, towards the end, but it was probably understandable, because Leigh and Christie totally screwed them with that damn wallpaper. If Christie had just worked with them from the start, no problem, but of course, it’s all about Christie (and not, y’know, the home-owners?) so she had to be utterly juvenile about it.

      It was kind of satisfying seeing the judges calling them out for it.

      But, as ever, tonight it’ll be interesting to see what David and Chiara think.

  17. The scoring in this reno showed not only how inconsistent it is for each reno, but also from the first reno through to the last. In this reno, a 6 was an indication of a failure, whereas in the first house, a 6 was the score given to the best zones. I think there were zones in the other houses more deserving of 9 or 10s, and that the bad zones in this reno (which was most of them) should have been given 3 or 4s. There is an obvious plan to crescendo the scoring through the seven renos. I see why it is done, but I think it annoying and quite unfair.

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