Last night’s episode of Mitre 10 Dream Home was chock-a-block with tools, tears and tantrums while the contestants faced disaster after disaster setting up their lounges.
Last week was the teams’ first turn on the tools, and that was pretty evident. Luckily they’ve got experienced builders on hand or I imagine both houses would collapse at the first sign of one of Christchurch’s many wee shakes.
The Orange Team, Marty and Sarah, have a tribe of six kids and want to build a new house after theirs was badly damaged in the quakes and they found themselves underinsured.
The Black Team, Jay and Amanda, have three children from Amanda’s previous marriage and admitted on the show last night “we’re not tradies, we don’t know what we’re doing”. Inspiring confidence from early on, ladies.
In last week’s master bedroom episode, the girls in black said they got “nailed”… Building puns are great.
Marty and Sarah were coming in hot off their win and had a lot of enthusiasm to take out the lounge challenge this week.
Jay and Amanda knew the room was a “must win” for them to catch up to the Orange Team, as the seemingly ageless host, Simon Barnett, pointed out every chance he got.
However, they hit disaster after disaster from early on. They weren’t allowed a wetback on their fire, then had some tense times when they were possibly not going to be allowed a fire at all.
Simon seemed to relish breaking that news to the girls, and, as he said himself, this sort of thing makes for good TV.
That made me wonder about the whole issue of getting an engineer to verify that they could cut into a beam for the fire flue.
After building ground to a complete halt for quite some time while they tracked down an engineer to “look over” the beam, they managed to get approval over the phone.
Surely an engineer would need to have a look at this beam if it was causing so much drama!
Throughout this saga, Jay kept saying she was “going to throw a tantrum like a little kid”.
She was pretty annoying throughout the whole episode, so a Simon-enforced time-out in the corner would have been quite nice.
As it turned out, she stormed off into a container at one stage and seemed to have her meltdown in there, which was definitely preferable to doing it on camera – I was envisaging one of those awkward moments at the supermarket when you have to navigate your trolley around a toddler throwing a hissy fit.
Except in this scenario, the toddler is an adult, and the trolley is a wheelbarrow full of building supplies.
Meanwhile, the Orange Team were so under control they were out shopping for a television and playing with paint test pots.
Marty picked a television that is only about a foot (30 centimetres) less wide than I am tall – a colossal 55 inches (140cm) that had the thumbs-up from all the guys, if not necessarily his wife.
Sarah worried that the “Moroccan spice” colour they picked for their feature wall would have viewers thinking they were taking their team colour too literally – she took the thought right from my head, but it actually ended up looking quite snazzy on the wall, and not like the inside of a pumpkin as I originally suspected.
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The two teams had to come together for a DIY challenge, which was putting gib on a wall.
Amanda broke down while watching the instructional video, and Jay said she wanted to slap her head – fitting, considering that was how I felt about Jay for most of the episode, although I did agree that there didn’t seem to be any reason for tears over a plasterboard how-to guide.
A bit more attention could have been paid to the video as it turned out: Amanda discovered the old “measure twice, cut once” only works if you actually measure accurately.
Despite Sarah managing to knock a whole corner off the Orange Team’s sheet, Marty managed to pull it together for them and they took away the $1000 prize for the second week running.
Back to the lounges, and Black Team builder Zach isn’t having a bar of another all-nighter like last week and says he can’t be babysitting everyone all the time.
Tensions are obviously high with a lot of work still to be done, so Amanda does the sensible thing and sits Zach down for a haircut.
When he sees she has put blue chalk in his hair, he tells her to build her own house and rinses the colour out with freezing-cold water from a hose.
A night of little sleep ensued for both teams, although Orange seemed to be country miles ahead.
In the light of day, Black Team’s troubles continued when a coffee table made out of bits of an old boat that Jay was obsessed with hadn’t turned up (cue tantrum), and a “custom-built bookcase” was way too big for the space it had been “custom-built” for.
With half an hour to go, the Black Team still hadn’t hung the wallpaper in the lounge, while the Orange Team were relaxing next door watching the new television with Simon.
When it came to crunch time, the judges were impressed with Jay and Amanda’s lounge and said it showed their personalities.
By comparison, Marty and Sarah’s was quite sparse, and I think they lost points for the noise that will come down from the floor above due to the much-agonised-over exposed beams.
The Black Team took out a narrow one-point victory, which the girls were clearly chuffed about. Less than stoked might be their bank manager – the Black Team spent $34,182 on their lounge, compared to the Orange Team’s $19,151.
Next week it’s bathrooms, so I’m bracing myself for some more waterworks. (Can’t get enough of the building puns.)
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