When Taeler and Elle’s family found out the two sisters were going on Dream Home together, they were a bit concerned.
“Our whole family was slightly nervous when we started because they were like, ‘You and Elle are going to fight the whole time!’” Taeler tells TV WEEK.
“We’re really close, but we’re sisters – we fight, we challenge each other. Like I might tell Elle, ‘You don’t look nice in that outfit,’ and then Elle’s like, ‘You’re a mum…’”
“‘You know nothing!’” Elle adds with a laugh.
But 33-year-old architect Taeler and 29-year-old HR professional Elle were surprised to find they actually didn’t fight much while filming the show.
“We became much closer,” Taeler says. “We worked so well together.”
It was Taeler’s idea for Elle to get her dated 1960s Melbourne house renovated through Dream Home, but she originally suggested Elle should team up with her partner, Brody, who’s a plumber.
When Elle couldn’t answer the questions in the application form about design styles, she told Taeler she’d have to do the show with her.
For Taeler, it was a big sacrifice to leave her young children, Harry and Willow, behind, and it made Elle “focused on winning from the start”.
“I went into it going, ‘We need to be strategic and we need to make sure that we’re not taking you away from your young children without being committed to trying to bring this 100k home,’” Elle explains. “Because that’s what she would get.”
This week on Dream Home, the sisters are working on the façade and front yard of Brad and Mel’s Melbourne house. As judging approaches, they tell the other teams and tradies they can’t use the home’s entrance. This leads to a disagreement between Taeler and head builder Luca, with Luca accusing Taeler of “barking” at him and saying he’s not going to speak to her again.
“The frustration, the stress was really high,” Taeler says. “I wanted to be able to have a conversation and logistically talk about it together, but he didn’t want to discuss it with me.”
Have Taeler and Elle just made things more difficult for themselves?