As we await the results of the vitally important Bathroom Week on The Block NZ: Villa Wars, Calum Henderson looks at how the teams are tracking.
1. Cat & Jeremy – House 3
The happy-go-lucky couple on the corner are leading a charmed life on The Block NZ, scooping Kid’s Bedroom Week from under Jamie and Hayden’s noses with a ludicrously high score of 9.5 from Judge Jason. He just really liked that transformer desk-shelf contraption, or perhaps was swayed by the room’s deeply iffy ‘Cowboys & Indians’ theme.
Maybe it was their shared love of shopping that won the week for them. Their room was filled with considerably more tat than all the others, strewn with retro (and probably quite racist) children’s books and dotted with knick-knacks and trendy succulents. But could the room’s intentionally untidy presentation have been concealing a visitor from the spirit world?
Nobody noticed anything until this man showed up to lay the carpet and immediately sensed an otherworldly presence lurking within House 3’s creaky timber framing.
How will Cat and Jeremy deal with their uninvited guest? At the moment it seems benevolent enough – it might even help them restore their old architraves or prove a selling point for a lonely millionaire come auction time. Something to keep an eye on for sure.
Bathroom Week looks to be a make-or-break week for the Taranaki Hardcore. Muck it up and they could easily undo all their success from the first two weeks, but a third win on the trot would set them up in an outrageously strong position for the rest of the show. You sense a lot hinges on Cat’s ambitious moss wall. Whichever way it goes, it’s definitely only a matter of time before Cat shows up on Kiwi Living extolling the health benefits of the moss pillow.
2. Jamie & Hayden – House 1
Haydz and Jaymz’s Kid’s Bedroom probably deserved to win last week. It was the most playful room – it had a bloody slide for Christ’s sake – and Hayden even managed to funnel his obsession for black surfaces into a nice useful blackboard wall. Possibly where they fell 0.5 points short was the weirdly menacing ‘inspirational’ slogans they plastered on every surface. Any eight year-old who had to contemplate this type of thing every time they got in or out of bed would end up living in a state of constant anxiety.
The pair’s strong undercurrent of sporty aggro seems to be finally paying off, though, with them winning a couple of handy challenges this week to set them up nicely down the track. But their hopes did receive a tiny dent with news that their secret weapon, talismanic Scottish builder Marty, will be unable to complete the final weeks of the show due to his visa status being under investigation. Seems a bit rough. What could have prompted all this?
3. Brooke & Mitch – House 4
Every team plastered their Kid’s Bedroom with an unavoidable array of depressingly upbeat slogans last week. The Christchurch couple opted for a throw pillow promising – or perhaps demanding – ‘Good Vibes’, and a wall hanging suggesting, vaguely, that the ‘Future’s so bright’ [sic]. Not sure if either of these statements are necessarily true of Brooke and Mitch. Their room received the lowest score of the week with its drab pink polka dotted walls making it look like it had come down with a case of the chicken pox.
Their bathroom has suffered endless delays due to the curse of House 4 being the last one any of the tradies get around to visiting. The fact that Mitch is a plumber means that this should be his week to shine, but he’s constantly being hamstrung by nothing ever being ready. After this week’s hypothermic physical challenge – forebodingly, in a simulation of a sinking ship – Brooke and Mitch returned to their house late at night to find an angry wizard in the bathroom. Things do not look good.
4. Sarah & Minanne – House 2
The sisters so tiny that they sleep in a matchbox and eat exclusively from New World’s range of Little Shop miniatures had a much better second week on The Block NZ. Their Kid’s Bedroom made such excellent use of space it ended up being, if anything, too spacious. Their recklessly marked world map wall decal relocated St Louis to the heart of Saskatchewan and North Korea to the middle of China. And, like many people, they seemed to struggle to figure out a use for throw pillows.
Sarah and Minanne’s bathroom seems to be coming along nicely after they fired their tiler for suggesting their design was completely unrealistic. Come on mate, this is The Block NZ, not real life. They then paid an off-peak visit to Tile Space and met some kind of Big Lebowski-style tile guru who spoke knowledgeably and at length about the sexy and relaxing qualities of black tiles, convincing them to invest a lot of money on a whole lot of very expensive stonework.
Providing this tile mystic doesn’t turn out to have been some incredibly stoned wanderer, and providing they don’t get murdered during another weirdly dangerous midweek physical challenge, Sarah and Minanne could be about to shrug off their horrible start to the competition and begin a heroic rise up the rankings.
The Block NZ: Villa Wars airs Sundays on TV3 at 7pm, and Mon-Thurs at 7.30pm
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