Shelley Craft and Scott Cam on The Block in 2025. Picture: Channel 9
The Block is leaving a trail of financial heartbreak across Australia as homeowners try to emulate the show’s glitzy renovations – and fail spectacularly, industry insiders have claimed.
Tradies companies told The Daily Telegraph the show inspired new DIY renovations every year, but there had also been a more recent explosion in the popularity of reality TV-inspired renos.
This was due to the advent of AI resources such as a ChatGPT and others, which DIY renovators were often drawing on for a step-by-step guide on how to do works themselves.
The problem was that many of these renovators used what they saw on TV as a guide for how quickly jobs could be pulled off, which was not always realistic.
Renovators then started works with inaccurate budgets, lofty ideas of how long it would take and a misunderstanding of what jobs were really in their scope without training.
The result was the eventual call up of expensive professional tradies to clean up botched renovations.
MORE: Why many people are wary of buying The Block homes
Sydney plumber Alex Taskun from GT Plumbing said homeowners often tried to emulate what they saw on the show with DIY projects. Picture: Sam Ruttyn
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Trades companies told The Daily Telegraph the problem was two-fold: the show helped to create unrealistic expectations about reno timelines and often encouraged misguided design choices.
Part of the reason for that misconception was that the series was alleged to not always fully represent just how long tradies worked on site to actually finish the jobs shown on screen.
Some tradies who worked on the show were reported to be large teams pulling long hours of 10-15 hours a day, which few homeowners would be able to afford on a real life reno project.
Show critics have also argued The Block’s designs were deliberately dramatic, built to grab attention for TV audiences rather than appeal to the broader property buying market.
Those who emulated the over-the-top features, quirky layouts, and high-end finishes could end up with beautiful but financially risky renovations, renovation experts said.
Alex Taskun, the director of GT Plumbing, said every year the show and other reality reno depictions inspired DIY renovations but they often ended in disaster.
He said he was often called in to fix the work – most of which involved a bathroom renovation gone wrong.
“People are mesmerised with all the glamour and special effects that TV does and think that they can get all these things done quite easily,” Ms Taskun said.
Mr Taskun said reality reno shows often gave people a false sense of what they could so themselves and in what timeframe, leading to expensive home damage. Picture: Tim Hunter.
“They have some timelines (on The Block). People think they can actually create this. It seems to be so easy. It’s definitely not. There is a reason our trades take so long and our compliance and governance and training is so important.”
Mr Taskun said he was recently called to fix a bathroom where the homeowners had connected toilet waste water into a shower pipe – not realising that it would damage a vital weir.
“Showers have a trap to catch hair and follicles and a water weir to stop the smell of the sewer coming through. When you discharge faecal matter into that, you are smelling poo 24/7,” he said.
Other incidents had seen homeowners attempt waterproofing themselves.
“They spend so much time only realising they haven’t done the waterproofing properly and then the whole bathroom needs to come out,” Ms Taskun said.
Renovator Cherie Barber, herself a star of reality reno TV shows, said the shows were for entertainment, not education. Picture: Tim Hunter.
Sunshine Coast carpenter Sil Lazzara said he has been commissioned multiple jobs on Airtasker to fix works he could see were clearly inspired by The Block and other renovation shows.
“Wallpaper is popular on all those shows. That can be a sign,” he said, adding that most people understood that a reality show was more for entertainment than accuracy.
There were nonetheless some people with a distorted view of renovation timelines, he explained.
“A lot of people get inspiration from those shows and try to give it a crack,” he said.
“You don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes, but the only thing I would say with The Block that’s unrealistic is the timeframes they do it in.
“Realistically I don’t understand how they can turn things around so quickly. Each week they get projects and I don’t know how you can do a bathroom in seven days. Bathrooms usually take four to six weeks.”
Renovating for Profit Cherie Barber, a professional renovator and a frequent guest on reality shows herself, said the things depicted on TV usually “made for great ratings but that’s not how your renovation project should be”.
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