Matthew Menichelli, director of Elevate Building Group, takes us behind the scenes.

Pressure and tension bubbling like a perfectly heated hot tub boiled over on The Block last night, as contestants blocked Mitch and Mark’s rooftop spa plans.

The Sydney couple needed the green light from three of the teams to be able to plonk the luxurious cherry on top of their sleek pad, but only Deb and Andy gave their blessing.

Tess and Luke’s refusal to give the go ahead hit a sore point for Mitch and Mark, whose tradies had been helping their battling Cairns counterparts.

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The Block 2019: Behind the scenes with tradie favourite Matt from Elevate Building Group

Tess and Luke’s showdown with Mark and Mitch over the spa and tradies.

The other four teams discuss Mitch and Mark over drinks.

The furious grandfathers ordered their workers, including plasterers due to start work on Tess and Luke’s property the next morning, not to go ahead with the job.

Elevate Building Group’s Matt Menichelli, Tess and Luke’s builder, said the emotional and expletive-laced confrontation was the result of months of hard work and little rest.

“We were eight or nine weeks in at this point and everyone was essentially running on empty really: lack of sleep, budget troubles and timeline issues all combining to fester into an overflow of emotions I guess, and there was a little bit of a shift in the morale,” he said.

“Early on in the piece the teams and the trades were quite obliged to help each other out and then, as the competition became real as the weeks progressed, everyone started playing the game and looking after their best interests to a degree.

“At the end of the day, it’s a reality TV show, and it’s a game, so I think if you don’t play it to a degree or if you don’t look after your own best interests, you might get left behind in reality, so that’s definitely what sort of started happening in the back half of the competition.”

Mr Menichelli, who Tess and Luke requested multiple times before eventually getting to come on board through Hipages, said Mitch and Mark pulling their trades “rattled” his team “a bit”.

“Trades are the one thing that are not only hard to convince to commit to the build but also hard to get to stick around,” he said.

“Plasterers, in particular, that’s probably the one trade that sort of cops a raw end of the deal week after week, just because they’re in the middle following the carpenters and following the structure and then they’re getting pushed to hurry up and finish so the contestants can get a coat of paint on on the Saturday and the Sunday.

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Matt helping out Tess and Luke on site.

Happier days.

“So they’re probably the highest turnover rate; it wasn’t just with us, it was with quite a few teams, but getting to the latter half of the competition it was an amalgamation of a few issues, the budget problems and Tess was a little bit homesick as well, she obviously missed the birth of her niece as well, so it was a bit of a concoction of a few different elements that sort of overflowed as you saw last night.”

Mr Menichelli said the vibe changed a bit on site after the spa drama, but that was between the contestants stuck in the “Block bubble” as the tradies just got on with the job.

He said the tradies were back on site having a laugh the next morning, happy to help out and had a beer off site away from the drama.

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