Life in the Bachelor Mansion isn’t all roses, according to contestant Alli Jo Hinkes, who dished this week to The Post about the show’s dirty laundry, some of which she cleaned up herself.
What surprised her most was how the 25 women competing for the leading man’s heart are all put up in just three rooms of bunk beds.
“The bunk bed situation really surprised me,” said Hinkes, 31.
“I was in a bedroom with maybe nine other girls. Everybody had bunk beds … suitcases, clothes everywhere.”
Hinkes, who grew up in Manalapan, NJ, took matters into her own hands when it came to tidying up the communal bedroom in the mansion, located on nine acres in Agoura Hills, CA.
“Actually, at one point, I put on gloves and started cleaning up people’s stuff because it was driving me nuts. There was stuff everywhere and I’m OCD.”
The brunette beauty, who was sent home on Week 3 of Grant Ellis’ season of “The Bachelor,” which airs its finale on March 24, also missed out on a lot of beauty sleep.
“The dates would go on until like three, four in the morning … I didn’t know I wasn’t going to get that much sleep, and sometimes I get a little cranky if I don’t get my minimum seven hours,” she said.
She also didn’t realize the amount of fake nails that would be falling off while on group dates, like the one where they all played basketball together.
“I lost so many nails,” she lamented. “Press-on nails, I will never do them again. I’d rather have no nails.”
Hinkes, who works as a boxing trainer, wasn’t impressed with the scarce gym equipment in the house, so led a group workout class for her castmates.
“They were sore the next day. I was making them run, do push-ups, jumping jacks, lunges. We were doing glute bridges. I timed everybody … It was a lot of fun.”
And she revealed there was no chef on the set of the ABC series, so the women had to fend for themselves in the kitchen.
“We cooked our own food. We had someone who would go to the grocery store and we would make a list of what we wanted, and we would cook for ourselves” she said.
An avid baker, she whipped up her signature banana bread for the cast and crew.
“When I’m stressed, I love to bake, it calms me down … I made it for all the girls, the cameramen ate it. It was a huge hit.”
When she made her debut on the show and met Ellis, a Newark native, for the first time, she presented him with a pizza, and asked, “Grant, will you accept a piece of my heart?”
“He tried to feed it to me, but I was like, ‘It’s going to ruin my lip gloss,’” said Hinkes.
“It’s so funny because everyone thought I was Italian … I wasn’t doing it to say I was Italian, it was just to represent New Jersey, and Grant is from there, and pizza is one of my favorite foods,” explained Hinkes, who is Jewish and whose family is from Russia and Czechoslovakia.
“Just to let you know, I don’t cook meatballs. I cook matzah balls,” she told Ellis.
