Why Jenny & Dave Marrs Would Never Compete on Rock the Block Again

While Jenny and Dave Marrs are hard at work on the eighth season of Fixer to Fabulous, there’s one HGTV series the couple isn’t interested in returning to anytime soon: Rock the Block.

“Never again,” Jenny joked in an exclusive interview with TV Insider. Dave, for his part, teased, “Maybe as judges.”

The spouses competed on Season 3 of Rock the Block back in 2022. The competition series follows teams of design duos as they renovate identical homes on the same block. The team that scores the highest appraised value for their home scores bragging rights and the street named in their honor.

On the show, Jenny and Dave competed against Bargain Block‘s Keith Bynum and Evan Thomas and Unsellable Houses stars Lyndsay Lamb and Leslie Davis. However, it was Married to Real Estate‘s Egypt Sherrod and Mike Jackson that were named the winners of Season 3.

For Jenny, competing on Rock the Block was a one-and-done experience. “It’s a hard show to do. It was fun. We had fun with our fellow contestants, but it’s also a really challenging show as a designer, especially because you’re putting your work out there to be judged,” she explained. “It’s a very vulnerable thing. When the show is airing, people are very, very critical and not encouraging, and I just have no room for that in my life. I’m good. It’s very hard.”

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Jenny said she felt the same pressure when she and Dave returned to the show as judges during a Season 4 episode. “People are so angry about your [judging], and you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m just trying to do my best. Sorry,’” she stated. “You can never make everyone happy, and people are very opinionated, and they love the show, and they get very excited, and I understand that, but it’s hard to be on the receiving end of that.”

Dave noted that Rock the Block was also difficult for their family, as they brought their five kids along during filming in South Carolina. “I would usually go to the job site at, I don’t know, five or six in the morning, so I could get some work done,” he said of navigating their roles on the show with their role as parents. “Jenny would get the kids started, and then we would work until seven, eight o’clock at night. Then, you come home, and we did homework with our kids at dinner.”

Jenny added, “I had to stage everything by myself, and I had one friend help me who lived there. So, I would get home around four on staging days, which was a lot of the time. So, I get home at four, Dave would leave at five, I get back to set at seven. It was just too much. It was not sustainable.”

Though HGTV fans shouldn’t expect to see Jenny and Dave back on Rock the Block down the line, Dave said they both have “a lot of respect for the people that do it year in and year out.”

Mike Davello for Aleve

One thing Dave and Jenny have learned from working on shows like Fixer to Fabulous and Rock the Block is the physical toll home renovation can take on the body. That’s why the couple recently teamed up with Aleve for their Project DIY campaign, which celebrates people across the country who put in the hard work into their at-home DIY projects.

“I think the great thing about what Aleve did was they built this around a remodel, around fixing up an area, in this case, a back porch of a home. With any kind of fixing up and any work, there comes pain, and a lot of work,” Dave told TV Insider. “And so, working through Aleve to basically get all-day-long pain relief, and then, do a renovation at the same time — it was a good mixing of getting to do a good thing for a person and talking about pain relief at the same time.”

Fixer to Fabulous Season 8, TBA, HGTV