Episode 23 Recap – The Block was hit by cheating allegations on Tuesday evening as Guest Suite Week gathered pace, with Chantel and Wyatt’s rapid progress putting their House 2 tilers under scrutiny, while budget dramas, damaged steel and a race to waterproofing kept the remaining teams under pressure.
With six days remaining until reveal, the five houses were already moving at dramatically different speeds. Chantel and Wyatt were out in front, Courtney and Sev were gathering momentum, Tayla and Spence were pushing ahead with their green guest-suite vision and Lisa and Rosco were racing towards another bathroom deadline.
For Adam and Jolene, however, returning from their Chery getaway at Jackalope meant confronting just how much work remained.
The House 1 couple returned feeling behind schedule, with insulation, plaster and waterproofing sign-off still on their list. Jolene was also refining the look of their guest suite, working with a palette of blush pink, cream, dark timber and wallpaper.
Their position was concerning enough to catch the attention of Foreperson Leonie, who praised the overall pace of the site but identified Adam and Jolene as the team she was most worried about.
The couple stayed on site late trying to claw back time, while Jolene began looking closely at their finances and considering where their Block Bucks could ease the pressure.
Over at House 3, Lisa and Rosco were charging towards sheeting their bathroom, with Rosco driving the site hard.
Then Lisa created an entirely different problem.
She accidentally drove over a piece of TRUECORE steel intended for the exterior cladding of their house.
“It’ll buff out,” Lisa says a little too optimistically, before realising that imperative piece of steel belongs to their house.
“This is bad.”
Site Supervisor GMac was considerably less optimistic when he inspected what had happened.
“That’s maggoted!” he said.
With Lisa and Rosco working with a $30,000 budget for the week, the prospect of replacing the damaged material was hardly welcome. Fortunately for the couple, Nine In Six was ultimately able to repair the steel, avoiding what could have become a costly mistake.
The real race, however, was happening inside the bathrooms.
House 2 races ahead
Chantel and Wyatt continued setting the pace, becoming the first team approved to move into waterproofing on Tuesday.
Their progress came with another boost when Wyatt was named the McCafe hardest worker, earning $5,000 cash.
Behind them, Courtney and Sev in House 4 and Tayla and Spence in House 5 also received sign-off and began chasing the same waterproofing milestone.
House 4 had found some rhythm after insulation was signed off by GMac and Foreperson Leonie, while House 5continued developing its green guest-suite concept.
There was one design choice creating tension in House 5: a planned barn door.
Rick, who was absent while recovering from a knee infection, was no fan of the idea, while returning Block contestant and Nine In Six employee Spence had stepped in to help Tayla during her father’s recovery.
It was Spence’s presence that would eventually ignite the episode’s biggest controversy.
Wednesday brings breakfast — and suspicions
By Wednesday, landlords Ben and Emma arrived with a McDelivery breakfast before the contestants returned to work.
Courtney and Sev applied their second waterproofing coat, completed insulation and sheeted the bedroom.
But Chantel and Wyatt were already fully waterproofed and looking towards tiling.
That extraordinary pace had caught Spence’s attention.
He knew House 2’s Cursio brothers, and after finishing work for the day had dropped over to see them while they were applying their first waterproofing coat to Chantel and Wyatt’s guest ensuite.
According to the supplied accounts, at least four hours needed to be left between waterproofing coats. With tools down approaching, Spence could not understand how the Cursio brothers could have completed the required work and then been ready to begin tiling when the site reopened the following morning.
For Spence, there appeared to be one explanation.
“That’s cheating.
If they’re tiling this morning that’s because they came back late last night,” he says.
His suspicions quickly found an enthusiastic audience in Tayla.
“House 2 has been cheating this whole freakin’ thing, let’s be quite honest,” she claims.
“They’re doing shady s–t over there.”
Another account recorded Tayla declaring:
“House Two has been cheating this whole fricken thing.”
While Spence did not go as far as Tayla’s broader allegation, the pair decided to confront the Cursio brothers.
Spence wanted to know how the waterproofing timeline had been possible.
“So you got two coats on yesterday afternoon,” he asked. “How?!”
Adrian Cursio had a quick response.
“Easy,” he replied. “Do you want some tips?”
But Tayla and Spence were not yet convinced.
The Cursios produce their evidence
The Cursio brothers then produced video showing them leaving the site before tools down.
One source described the footage as showing Adrian leaving at 8.00pm, while another said the timestamp showed the brothers leaving at two minutes to tools down.
The explanation given was straightforward: the brothers document their start and finish times for invoicing.
For Wyatt, that accounted for why the footage existed.
For Tayla, the fact they had filmed themselves leaving raised another question.
“The fact you video yourself walking out of the gate, do you do that every night,” she says.
Spence accepted that the footage showed them leaving, but remained uncertain about what might have happened afterwards.
“I believe they left at 8pm, it’s whether they came back,” he said.
The accusation was serious, but the pair had no evidence showing the tilers had returned after leaving.
Tayla acknowledged exactly that.
“It’s so bad but we’ve got no information to prove them wrong.
I’m not going to tell any of the other contestants, if they find out they find out,” she says.
That promise lasted only minutes.
The rumour races around The Block
Despite saying she would not tell the other contestants, Tayla soon began sharing the allegation.
The story travelled from House 5 to House 4, then through the other houses until almost everyone had heard some version of the accusation.
Courtney questioned why anyone already so far ahead would need to risk breaking the rules.
“We’re all for people getting a push if they’re in strife but you’re a day ahead so why do you need to break the rules?” Courtney wonders.
By the time the rumour reached Lisa and Rosco, it had become one of the biggest talking points on site.
Lisa initially reacted to the allegation with disbelief.
“What a scandal, if that’s true, fists are going to fly,” she said.
But after considering what was actually known, Lisa concluded there was no evidence supporting the accusation.
The Cursio brothers, meanwhile, were shocked to discover they were being accused of cheating — particularly because the suspicion had originated with Spence, who knew them.
“I can’t believe she said that,” Gino said.
For Chantel, the accusations appeared to be another consequence of how quickly House 2 was moving.
“Cheating is a nice word,” she shrugged. “It keeps coming up because we are too fast. Jealousy.”
Unlike some previous Block disputes, the accusation did not result in a body corporate meeting or a major confrontation between all five teams.
The material supplied for the episode did not establish that Chantel and Wyatt, or the Cursio brothers, had broken the rules. The footage showed the tilers leaving the site, while Spence’s suspicion centred on whether they could have returned afterwards and how the required waterproofing process had been completed in the available time.
Lisa goes hunting for an agent
Away from the cheating chatter, Lisa and Rosco had another job to tackle.
The couple discovered that the real estate agency associated with the previous year’s winning team had not yet been secured by another house.
Lisa had believed Rick and Tayla had an arrangement with Buxton Real Estate, only to discover Tayla had parted ways with the agency after failing to “vibe” with her agent.
According to the supplied material, the agent lived two hours away in Ballarat and had advised Tayla to cancel her herringbone flooring.
Lisa headed to Mount Eliza to approach real estate agents and checked with Tayla about the situation with Buxton Real Estate.
With no such reservations themselves, Lisa and Rosco eventually secured Buxton Real Estate and showed the agency’s team through their property, delighted they had managed to lock them in.
Adam’s $2500 decision sends Jolene over the edge
Back at House 1, Jolene was beginning to feel increasingly confident about her design decisions as she shopped for guest ensuite lighting.
That confidence did little to prepare her for what Adam had done with their budget.
Adam had spent $2500 of their tiling voucher on a new waterproofing system from Beumonts.
With House 1 already under financial pressure, Jolene was furious to discover the money had been committed to waterproofing rather than the tiles she had expected to buy.
“Are you f..king joking?
Well there goes the budget.
You don’t have funds to pay the trades next week, what the f**k,” she rages.
The disagreement came as Freedom wardrobes began installation and the couple continued trying to recover lost ground.
For Jolene, the issue was no longer simply whether they could complete the room on time. She was also worried about how they would fund the work still to come.
House 3 refuses to tempt its bathroom curse
While House 2 pushed the boundaries of the schedule with its early waterproofing, Lisa and Rosco took the more traditional route.
They stuck with Wednesday waterproofing, acutely aware of what had become their bathroom curse.
Their decision put them behind Chantel and Wyatt, but the pace in House 2 was now attracting almost as much attention as the rooms themselves.
It marked a striking change for Chantel and Wyatt.
At the end of Week One, the pair had faced criticism over their budget and responded by retreating to the share house while talking about quitting.
This time, when accusations of cheating were circulating around the site, they appeared considerably less rattled.
For Chantel, being the subject of conversation was evidence that House 2 was doing something right.
For Jolene, hearing the latest site gossip produced a rather different response.
“What the f–k is going on?” she wondered aloud.
By the end of the episode, no evidence had emerged proving House 2 had cheated. Instead, the dispute remained built around Spence’s calculations, Tayla’s suspicions, the Cursio brothers’ timestamped footage and an unanswered question among some contestants about how House 2 had managed to get so far ahead.
And there was little time for anyone to dwell on it.
With Guest Suite Week continuing, the next episode was already promising more pressure: one team facing a “gut-wrenching” decision, a “cranky” contestant confronting GMac and another threatening to walk.
