Interview: The Season 7 Winners of 'Rock the Block' Tell All

It's official: Longtime friends and Survivor alums Chelsea Meissner and Kim Spradlin-Wolfe are the winners of Rock the Block Season 7. Out of the four competing teams, Chelsea and Kim used $275,000 to add the most value to their builder-grade Las Vegas home. “Our goal was to create an immersive experience where you felt like you’d been transported somewhere else as soon as you walked in the door,” says Kim.

Before filming the pair prepped by bingeing past seasons and studying what worked and what didn’t. And rather than chase what they thought the judges wanted, Chelsea and Kim trusted their instincts and took on some major risks. In the end, their bold and highly personal approach didn’t just stand out — it earned them the champion title and a street named in their honor. Ahead, HGTV talks with the Season 7 champions about their strategy, the risks that paid off and how they created a winning design.

Kim: The first time Chelsea and I saw each other was on a beach in Samoa while filming Survivor. It was an immediate connection. I knew right away, and I’ve heard Chelsea say this too, that we were cut from the same cloth. When HGTV came to us with the Rock the Block offer, we knew we wanted to do it — but with kids at home, it became a question of how we were actually going to pull it off. My husband stepped up like the true hero he is and took one for the team for seven weeks so I could go back and forth from Las Vegas to Texas, while Chelsea moved her life to Las Vegas and made it work there with her mom and her daughter.

Chelsea: Yes, it was more about figuring out the logistics. We first asked ourselves, “Can we actually do this?” The adventurous part of us was like, “Hell, yes!”

Chelsea: After we decided, okay, we’re doing this, we had a conversation about how we wanted to do it. We needed to make sure that, at the end of the day, we were having a good time. If there were things out of our control, we wanted to make light of them and do the best we could to enjoy ourselves, because the last thing we wanted to do was uproot our lives to go do something miserable. If we lost every challenge, lost the whole show — so what? At least we had fun. We started out in that headspace, so there was really nothing that was going to turn that around for us.

Kim: Chelsea and I understand each other at a different level. We can be negative in a funny way, joke about things, laugh things off, kind of pick at each other, but it’s all in such a good spirit that nothing about it ever feels hard or malicious. I’m having a hard time remembering an actual real conflict that we had.

Chelsea: We actually met with one of our favorite designers, Cortney Bishop, before we did the show to pick her brain a little bit. The first thing out of her mouth after seeing our mood boards was, “Swampy Sexy.” I had never thought to put those two words together when it came to naming a design style, but it was spot on. But we ultimately switched to “Smoky” because no one really understood “Swampy” but us.

Kim: It was “Swampy Sexy” until minutes before we started filming. We were actually asking the guys driving the tractors what they thought as we attempted to get a majority vote!

Kim: I think a lot of the decisions we made did come off as risky, but really, we were just doing the thing we wanted to do, the thing we envisioned, the thing we were passionate about. We were trying to create spaces that, if we owned the home, we knew we would want to see happen there. I’m grateful that we didn’t play it safe. We didn’t do the Vegas version of Vegas — we did our version of Vegas.

Chelsea: What someone might call a risk didn’t seem like that to me. Most of them I would have done anyway. Looking back, even if I didn’t know the outcome of the show, there’s nothing I would have changed. Every risk was a reward in my eyes.

Chelsea: I truly loved the oversized banquette — if I were redoing a house, I definitely would put one in my kitchen. I also loved how we connected the primary closet to the RV garage that we turned into a bathhouse. As a homeowner, I just thought how awesome it would be to walk through your closet and have the cold plunge, the sauna, the gym all right there.

Kim: I was obsessed with the wood paneling in the entry and dining area. I love putting it in spec-homes because it makes it feel like it’s been there forever and gives the house a more collected feel.

Kim: When Chelsea brought up the idea, I was excited. It felt cool to have something buried underneath the layers of a home, something that feels like a blessing.

Chelsea: I’ve seen this done in a couple of houses before, where people write Bible quotes or inspirational quotes to give the house good energy.

Kim: One of the things I know about myself is that I don’t take feedback well, so I think I would have gotten defensive in person, and that probably would not have been agreeable to the judges. I don’t know that it wouldn't have done us any favors for me to be there!

Chelsea: I agree. I wouldn’t have wanted to walk through our spaces with the judges. Watching back, it’ll be fun to hear what they had to say about our design!

Kim: This was 100% Chelsea — I wanted the money! I’m always the one who chooses fun and fluff over nuts-and-bolts strategic decisions. Given how close all the home values were though, adding those dollars to the value of the home was the right decision.

Chelsea: It’s easy to forget about the end game when you’re focused on each individual challenge — you can kind of start losing sight of what you’re really there for. You have to keep reminding yourself how close the final numbers can be.

Chelsea: We had put it into our heads, maybe just to protect our hearts, that we didn’t stand a chance of winning. When our names lit up the sky, I was just in complete shock. I buried my head in Kim’s boobs!

Kim: I was also 100% shocked. Honestly, the prevailing feeling I’ll remember was just how peaceful it felt when you realize you were in the right place at the right time with the right people, doing the right thing. Then, to have that validated, it just felt really cool and special.