The Block (2003-2004; 2010-) exemplifies Australia’s fixation on home renovation. Renovation programs are a reality television sub-genre characterised by excess, artifice, and questions of property and possession – also key concerns of the Gothic. The Block’s renovations appear homely: the goal is to produce more comfortable, more stylish, more suitable homes. Following Freud’s assertion that homeliness inevitably gives rise to the unhomely, I argue that renovation on The Block is an unhomely process in which the unprepossessing suburban houses under renovation become labyrinthine counterfeits of the Australian dream of home ownership, where contestants encounter spectres of bankruptcy and housing insecurity, and undergo endlessly repeated cycles of claustrophobia and crisis that return to haunt them even after the program has ended.