By Emma and Ben

If your idea of a relaxing weekend used to involve a sander, a spreadsheet and a tape measure that always seems to disappear, welcome. You’ll understand what we’re about to say.

We’re Emma and Ben, and you might remember us from The Block 2025. Prior to The Block we completed two renovations and a new build and now we’ve started our fifth project: a three-bedroom fixer-upper in Mount Martha, on the Mornington Peninsula. It’s rough around the edges, it needs a lot of love and the list of jobs is very long. It’s also our first reno with a baby. Meet Bailey, aka Bails, who has no idea what he’s in for.

The walls are down, the dust is everywhere and the finish line is a long way off, so this isn’t a “look how perfect it turned out” story. It’s the honest, unfiltered version of the challenges of renovating with a baby in tow.

Everything Takes Longer Than You Think

If we could tell our first-time-renovator selves one thing, this is it. There are always surprises once you start pulling things apart. Our very first house had a wasp nest in one wall, a rat nest in another and a third wall that was completely rotten. Lovely.

Before Bails, we could spend a whole weekend on the tools and keep going until a job was finished. Now everything works around naps, meals and making sure one of us is watching him. We’re accepting that this one will take a lot longer, and that’s okay.

Safety Changes Everything

We used to leave tools, materials and mess wherever it landed. That’s not an option now. Everything needs a proper place, well out of reach of a curious little person.

A building site is basically a baby’s dream: power cords, offcuts, nails, dust and a hundred interesting things to pick up and put in his mouth. This time we have to be constantly on guard and thinking differently about our process. Tools get packed away at the end of every work session, not “later”. Materials are stacked and stored out of reach rather than left lying around. And we’ve created an area just for Bailey, separate from the work zone, so there’s always somewhere safe for him to play.

Get Organised Before Day One

People underestimate how much a renovation takes over your daily life. There are constant decisions, plans change, timelines move, and somehow you’re always covered in dust.

Our best advice is to get organised before you start. Ben is the king of the spreadsheet, and I’m a moodboard girl. It can be stressful while you’re in it, and we expect this one to be more so with Bailey around. But we genuinely love the process, and seeing it all come together makes it worth it.

Where Does All Your Stuff Go?

Everything has to go somewhere, and it’s one of the biggest challenges of any reno. We learned that the hard way, and we also slightly underestimated just how much stuff we own.

Once we stripped the house back to the frames, everything needed to move out of the way. For a while it was all stacked under the pergola with a pretty ordinary attempt at covering it with a tarp. It was not our proudest moment. Now we have TAXIBOX containers on site for the duration of the reno, which keeps our things safe, clean and dry, and means we can still grab what we need along the way.

What’s Next

We can already see what this house could be. We’re opening up the rooms and bringing in natural light, warm timber and mood lighting.

There’s a long road ahead, and we’re sure the really chaotic baby-and-builders stories are still to come. Naps will clash with noisy trades, dust will find its way into everything, and Bailey will no doubt have strong opinions about his new building site. We’re not expecting it to go smoothly, but we are expecting to learn a lot, and to laugh a fair bit along the way. We’ll be sharing all of it, including the questionable decisions and the before and afters. Follow along on Instagram.