Heavy/HGTV Mina Starsiak Hawk and Karen E. Laine of HGTV's "Good Bones"
Things are not good for the stars of “Good Bones.” That’s according to longtime HGTV star Mina Starsiak Hawk, who recently announced that the popular series she’s starred in since 2016 with her mom, fellow renovation expert and lawyer Karen E. Laine, will end after the eighth season, which premiered on August 15, 2023.
Laine retired in 2019 from Two Chicks and a Hammer, the renovation business she co-owned with her daughter, according to People, but she has continued to appear on the show doing DIY projects and advising renovations.
During the final 10-episode season, HGTV said in a press release, the duo would “continue to buy dilapidated Indianapolis properties” and transform them into “beautifully renovated family homes for sale” — including helping Starsiak Hawk’s younger siblings, sister Kelsy and brother Tad, “reimagine their new homes.”
When Starsiak Hawk first revealed the show was ending, via her “Mina AF” podcast on August 8, she said it was a “good decision” made mutually with HGTV, describing parting ways with the cast and crew as “like a divorce.”
Now, in the newest episode, she’s given more context to the situation, revealing that she, her mom and her siblings “are not in a great place.” Here’s what you need to know:
Mina Starsiak Hawk Describes Relationship With Mom & Brothers
On the newest episode of her podcast, which was posted on August 28 but recorded a week before her son Jack turned 5 on August 9, Starsiak Hawk said she was struggling to decide who to invite to the party, which she said is typically a family event.
Noting that her relationship with her family was “challenging,” she wondered aloud whether not inviting them would matter to Jack and his 2-year-old sister, Charlie.
“Will it affect my kids? Will they even notice who’s here and who’s not here? There’s going to be a bunch of animals. That’s all they care about,” she said.
Starsiak Hawk mused, “Am I being true to myself and my husband by setting appropriate boundaries for certain people to be here or not be here?”
Describing the “current state of affairs” to curious fans, she said, “My mom and I aren’t in a great place. My brother Tad and I aren’t in a great place. My brother William and I are in a kind-of-like-nonexistent place. It’s complicated without even being complicated. We don’t really engage much and the last engagement wasn’t super-positive, and that was maybe a year ago.”
“We all always coexist,” she continued. “We went on family vacation together and everyone is pleasant enough around each other. And is that the good thing — the right thing — or is that all just being wildly dysfunctional?”
Thinking again about whether they should be at her kids’ birthdays, she said, “Not only do my mom and my two brothers not fall into that category of being involved in their life on a regular basis, we’re also not on good terms.”
Starsiak Hawk’s half-brother Tad was a fixture on “Good Bones” for years, serving as project manager on renovations. According to ScreenRant, his birth mother died when he was young and Laine served as a mother figure to him, forging a close bond.
On her latest podcast, Starsiak Hawk said her kids know him as “the uncle that’s at Thanksgiving at my dad’s house.”
“We all come together for the things that are important to my dad,” she said. “So we all go on family vacation and kind of deal with whatever weird awkwardness is happening at the time. And we all act nice and like normal adult humans, because this is an important thing for a handful of different people. I think at the top of that list is my dad.”
“Whenever there’s an event,” she continued, “we all put our big-kid pants on and pretend to be nice to each other and do the event, and then go back to our corners of the universe and talk s*** about each other.”
“And I just don’t want to do that,” she said. “Because that doesn’t feel genuine. It doesn’t feel real. And it’s just not what I want my life to be.”
This Is Not the First Time Mina Starsiak Hawk Has Been Estranged From Her Mom
On August 8, the same day Starsiak Hawk announced the show’s end, her mom shared a promo for the final season on Instagram and weighed in on the situation in her comment section, including writing, “I wouldn’t call this the end, who knows what the future holds”
When a fan asked whether that meant a new show was in the works, Laine cryptically replied, “It means that one person’s perspective on their future does not control other people’s perspectives about the future”
And after a different fan commented, “I wish you would do a gardening show… pretty please???” Laine responded, “from your lips to HGTVs ears.”
Two days later, Laine posted a photo of her with her daughter. When someone expressed disappointment on that post that “Good Bones” is ending, she responded, “Just because Mina says it’s over for her, doesn’t mean the future doesn’t hold something for me.”
At the time of publication, Laine had not specifically commented on Starsiak Hawk’s revelations about their current family dynamics. But this is not the first time the mother-daughter duo has been estranged.
In 2021, Starsiak Hawk told The List, “We always have these ups and downs. That’s how mom and I have been, honestly, since I was like 6. We didn’t talk for a year — like, my first year of college.”
Before the official announcement that “Good Bones” was being discontinued, Starsiak Hawk alluded to the upcoming changes in an early August appearance on the “Paltrocast With Darren Paltrowitz” podcast, leaving the door open for future HGTV projects but not necessarily with her mom.
Starsiak Hawk said, “Just a lot of cool different things that are happening. My mom’s in North Carolina with her house. We’re all just … it’s been almost 10 years that we’ve been doing (‘Good Bones’) so we’ve got this nice, like, reset where we’re all figuring out what the new, next exciting thing is. And I’m sure whatever that is, it’s going to be on camera.”
HGTV also issued a statement to Deadline that said, “While this is the end of ‘Good Bones’ as we know it, we’re currently in talks with Mina and Karen about other projects.”