The Block stars' simple $4 hack for transforming your home: 'Brand new'

While it’s fun to watch renovation shows like The Block, Dream Home and Selling Houses Australia to seek inspiration for your own home, it’s often not possible to recreate the transformations due to lack of skill, time and budget. Channel Nine’s latest series Budget Battlers aims to challenge this, with former Block stars Jess Eva and Norm Hogan demonstrating how you can renovate your entire house on a $10,000 budget in just one week.

The series, which premieres on Wednesday, December 4, showcases multiple cost-saving hacks to completely transform your kitchen, living room, bedroom and bathroom. One simple trick involves buying new door handles to install on your kitchen cabinets, which are available for around $4.20 at Kmart or $4.85 at Bunnings.

“With handles and things like that, I look at it like you've got a beard and long hair,” Norm tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “If you go and shave your beard and have a haircut, you look completely different and brand new but you’ve still got the same old head.

“So if you put a coat of paint on and change the knobs around, it doesn't cost a lot of money. Paint doesn't cost a lot of money and door knobs or door handles don't cost a lot of money, but they can make a big difference. They’re just cheap hacks that you can do yourself.”

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Jess adds that an easy way to transform your kitchen benchtop is to use self-adhesive film, which is available in a range of colours and designs at Kmart for $7.50.

“If you're a parent and you can contact your kids’ school books, you can make marble bench tops,” she shares. “It’s amazing what a lick of paint or just a bit of a freshen-up can do.”

How Budget Battlers compares to The Block

Jess and Norm, who were fan favourites when they competed on The Block in 2018, describe Budget Battlers as “100 per cent authentic reality TV”.

“Actually, I wouldn’t even call it reality TV, it’s basically a documentary,” she remarks. “Nothing’s fabricated or played up, there are no producers saying ‘Do this’, and even the people who let us transform their homes were all people who knew people who knew people who could help. It was just this ripple effect of kindness.”

When comparing the series to The Block, Norm admits filming Budget Battlers was “a lot harder” because of the quick turnaround, tight budget and extremely long days.

“On The Block, the first couple of days you aren’t doing 20 hours a day and it’s later in the week when you're doing the all-nighters. Whereas on this show, it's every day we do it. There's one or two nights where you’re just doing all-nighters, and then come the end of it, you are absolutely exhausted,” he details.

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In addition to hosting the new series, Jess has been working on Budget Battlers for almost five years and feels “emotional” and “very proud” ahead of its release.

“I feel really honoured that Nine went outside the traditional formats of renovation shows, and I think that everybody will relate,” she says. “No matter if you're rich or poor, there's not one project you can't do from each episode the next day - even if you've got 10 bucks in coins in the centre console of your car.”

Budget Battlers premieres Wednesday, December 4 on Channel Nine

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