Kristie and Leigh are the first team to be eliminated from this season of House Rules. The Victorian couple ended up on the bottom of the leaderboard after Mandy and Toad passed the bonus room renovated by Kim and Michelle.
The intensely competitive Kristie and her chippy husband Leigh created controversy in their time on the show. Kristie, 36, is aware they came across as the villains. But she insists that they’re not nasty.
“We are nice people,” she tells TV WEEK. “We help anybody. Anybody that knows us knows that we’ll be there at the drop of a hat.”
She says Leigh would offer advice to other teams.
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“Leigh would sometimes try and help people lay out their room: ‘I wouldn’t have that there. Why are you putting that there?’ They appreciated it.
“Even Kimmy said on the last day, ‘You’ve helped me like no one else did in this competition,’ which was really nice.”
Kristie believes some fans of the show mistook their confidence for arrogance.
“We’ve built before, we’ve renovated before, and my husband’s been designing homes since he was 17. We came into this competition with a lot of experience. People see that as we’re stuck up.”
She says they were also very organised and did a lot of planning before each renovation.
“Putting us in a competition with people that have never done this before and go into zones not prepared and not planned can make us look like the villains.”
As for the incident where Kristie sold Mel and Dave’s sewing machine to Josh and Brandon, Kristie say she “wasn’t cheating at all”.
“I wasn’t trying to rip them off,” she insists. “It was more being cheeky. I’m a bit of a prankster.”
However, she realises that it didn’t come across well on TV.
“For people that don’t know me it would have looked bad, so I do apologise.”
Kristie says she and Leigh are “grateful” for the experience of the show. She says they’ve stayed in touch with all the other teams, even the ones they had dramas with.
“I speak to Chiara a fair bit. Chiara’s a beautiful person. And Toad and Mandy – we’re going up there at Christmastime.”
