The Block Island episode 6 & 7 recap: Paige tells producers to she’s ready to walk

4 weeks ago 10

Every season of The Block has a couple who make it look easy and a couple who make it look way harder than it should be.

This year Ricky and Haydn are the first and Jesse and Paige are the latter.

Their exhausting rollercoaster of moods and emotions is stressful to watch.

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Last week it was Jesse on the phone to his mum complaining about how hard the show is. This week it’s Paige, who is also threatening to quit at regular intervals.

“This environment is not what I was expecting … If you guys are listening to this you should probably start looking for a replacement, okay?” Paige says, addressing producers who might be eavesdropping on her and Jesse’s conversation.

Paige tells Jesse she’s ready to walk off the show.

Her mood lifts when Haydn takes her out for a day of shopping and fast food, but plunges again the next day when a producer tries to coax out of her a description of her design aesthetic. The best she can come up with is ‘green’.

She seems particularly bitter with the items available through sponsor dollars.

“Without sounding like an a***hole, everything that’s available on Block bucks I don’t like. I would rather sleep on rocks than put a linen quilt on my bed. Everything is rattan. The judges want something Instagrammable but that’s so five years ago and cringy to me,” she says.

But by the end of Episode 7 it’s Jesse who is exploding. When Paige complains he’s not communicating with her he shouts “I’m sick of f***ing wasting time! It’s all we’re doing, can we just get on with it.”

Paige says she’d rather sleep on rocks than under a linen quilt.

Rumours during shooting suggested one couple walks off the show early in the season, and it seems likely it’s going to be this pair.

Elsewhere, Courtney and Grant are having their own issues.

They overspent by a whopping $13,000 in bathroom week, and Scott Cam is here to warn them that they’ll run out of money by week six if they keep it up.

Poor time management and planning by their builders is partially to blame, with other trades being kept waiting on full hourly rates and Grant resolves to have a tough conversation with them — his second in as many weeks.

His version of handling the delicate situation is to storm in with his builders’ invoice to tell them “We’re not paying that”.

Good talk.

Grant tells his builders his solution to their sizeable bill is that he won’t be paying it.

Last week’s winners Kristian and Mimi are struggling too, but most of their issues come down to Kristian either forgetting things, cutting corners or buggering things up. At least he seems to have given up his career in forgery.

This week he forgets to soundproof a pipe that runs from an upstairs toilet through a downstairs bedroom wardrobe, creates a bulkhead that foreman Dan picks as being bowed the second he walks into the room and stuffs up his insulation by tearing it into pieces and jamming it in leaving huge gaps.

As discussed, the only pair who seem to be having genuine fun is Ricky and Haydn, and one of them has a one-week-old baby he’s barely seen.

Haydn introduces Ricky to baby Matilda.

There is a sweet moment when Haydn’s partner surprises him and Ricky by bringing baby Matilda along to one of their appointments in the city.

Seeing godfather Ricky holding the tiny little girl in her pink knitted jacket is a moment of Zen hidden within a blizzard of swearing, complaining and tears.