Competitive Queenslanders Mel and Dave are just inches away from stealing the 2018 House Rules victory.
The Gold Coast husband and wife are self-confessed risk-takers who bought their house without an inspection and put their life savings into a gym franchise. And clearly their tactics have paid off, as these two have made it to the grand final.
Mel and Dave, who have two sons, Westin, five and Billy, three, have made it no secret that they’re keen to win. They hope to use the prize money so that Dave can quit his fly-in, fly-out job and stay at home with their family.
“It’s not the money – it’s what the money could do for us,” says Mel.
“If we were to win House Rules, we’d definitely celebrate a little bit and take the family out and all the friends and people who’ve helped us along the way,” says Dave.
These risk-takers are hungry for a victory.
Speaking exclusively to Now To Love, judge Laurence Llewelyn Bowen says, “Dave and Mel, they could develop very easily, they have a real finger on the pulse on that mainstream Hamptons look.”
But unlike some of the other more out-there renovators, Mel and Dave have been consistently good at showing off what LLB called “ghastly good taste.”
“They had that commitment to getting everything to work together, it was all very subdued, very tasteful, but that doesn’t necessarily create an exciting, invigorating or indeed successful room, it’s great if you’re mass producing show homes and my fight with them was always to engage with some risks which was something they’d never really responded to. But the fact that they’re in the final shows that they have opened their hearts and their minds a bit.”
And they’ve had some great critique from the judges. Their dining room at Toad and Mandy’s made Wendy say that it deserved a full page in Home Beautiful magazine and that it was, “Right up there with some of the best rooms I’ve ever seen.”
Take a look at their masterpiece dining room below.
However, despite their talent, they’ve also stirred up their fair share of drama and have had some eyebrow-raising moments on the show.
When they were renovating Leigh and Kristie’s home, Mel and Dave and Chiara and David clashed for pretty much the whole week.
Dave altered the dividing wall between their zones without telling Chiara and David and when questioned, Dave said he “forgot” to mention it, though later told the cameras “I just didn’t tell him if you want to know the truth,” and that if “you snooze, you lose.”
And despite agreeing upon an open plan, Mel and Dave decided to put a curtain up between the bedroom and the en-suite, and let’s just say Chiara and David were not happy about it.
“We don’t hate them,” Mel says of the couple. “We just don’t get along.”
WATCH: Mel and Dave versus Chiara and David.
Not only that, but Mel and Dave took a strategic approach when they gave Leigh and Kristie a bonus room to complete in the hopes that they would fail and even clashed with their finalist rivals, Toad and Mandy.
During the renovation of widow Chelsea Dunley’s home, Mel stuck a note on Chelsea’s original vanity, claiming it as hers, but then abandoned it in favour or something rather similar to Mandy’s original idea.
“The little note on the vanity was quite shocking,” Mandy told TV WEEK. “I think that was just very pushy and greedy.”
However, the couple admitted to TV WEEK that they knew how they came across on TV and that some of their moves were “cringeworthy” when they watched the show back.
“Dave and I are very competitive. I think it does come across as arrogant, but we’re not arrogant people.
“We went in wanting to win and that was the only thing we wanted to do – win.”
Family comes first for Mel and Dave.
