Heavy/HGTV HGTV's Mina Starsiak Hawk
Though Mina Starsiak Hawk’s hit HGTV show “Good Bones” will end after its eighth season, which premiered on August 15, 2023, the designer and renovation expert may not be saying goodbye for good to the network.
Starsiak Hawk and her mom, Karen E. Laine, have starred on the Indianapolis-based show since 2016, featuring some of the renovations they took on with their company, Two Chicks and a Hammer. When Laine decided to retire in 2022, Starsiak Hawk bought out her share of the company, but the two continued to film the show together, with Laine focusing more on gardening and design than on renovation work.
Though their show is ending, HGTV recently revealed it’s in talks with both stars to continue on the network in a new capacity. And in a new interview, Starsiak Hawk shared some of the ideas she’s considering.
HGTV in Discussions With ‘Good Bones’ Stars About Their Future
HGTVMentors and judges on season one of “Battle on the Beach”
On August 8, Starsiak Hawk revealed on her “Mina AF” podcast that she’d just filmed the final scenes of “Good Bones,” saying that the process of ending the show, including saying goodbye to the cast and crew, felt “like a divorce.”
“It’s the end of an era,” Starsiak Hawk said. “I mean, I had to say goodbye to some people today that I have spent my last almost 10 years with.”
But Deadline has reported that in a statement confirming the show’s cancelation, HGTV 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.”
In a new episode of the ” Paltrocast With Darren Paltrowitz” podcast, which she recorded before revealing that “Good Bones” was ending, Starsiak Hawk shared some of the ideas she was considering for future HGTV projects, including filming renovations at her new lake house, an idea she’s floated before.
“We’ve got a little breathing room and are figuring out what’s next,” she said. “My husband and I bought a lake house and, you know, I think that might be part of what we start filming.”
“Just a lot of cool different things that are happening,” she continued. “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.”
Starsiak Hawk also said she’d be open to appearing on HGTV’s competition shows again. She competed on the first season of “Rock the Block” and returned as a judge during the 2023 season. She also appeared as a judge on the first season of “Battle on the Beach.”
“I actually was talking to my manager yesterday and he brought up ‘Rock The Block,” she said. “I would definitely judge. I still have some PTSD from that first season because a first season of anything is so challenging. But I think (so much) time has passed that I’ve forgotten how painful that was. I would do ‘Rock The Block’ again, I would always judge ‘Rock The Block’ (if asked). It’s such a super fun show.”
“I loved doing ‘Battle On The Beach,'” she added. “I would definitely do that again.”
And then Starsiak Hawk said she may even be working on something with the longtime HGTV series “House Hunters.”
“There might some fun ‘House Hunter’ stuff,” she said. “I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to say about that. But ‘House Hunters’ has always been I mean, that’s O.G. HGTV!”
Why is ‘Good Bones’ Ending?
HGTVMina Starsiak Hawk and Karen E. Laine of “Good Bones”
Starsiak Hawk said on her “Mina AF” podcast that after eight seasons, it felt like a natural time for “Good Bones” to end but she hated saying goodbye to the cast and crew.
“I threw everything against the wall to see what would stick to try to keep the team together just for the idea of keeping the team together,” she added.
But in the end, she realized she needed to let go of the past for her own physical and emotional health, saying she had become “a version of myself that I really didn’t like.”
She also told Collider that her mom’s retirement shifted their dynamic of working together on each house, which will be apparent on the last season of the show.
“Whereas I would review floor plans, we’d go over those together, I don’t do that (now), and the design is much more me and touching base with MJ (Coyle),” she explained. “So a lot of the things that were the role that she played when she was still an active part of the company, with her being retired now, she doesn’t deal with those things.”
Starsiak Hawk continued, “She does the things that she really loves doing, and that is landscaping and then her projects — that is where she shines, and those aren’t work for her, so those make sense to keep doing. Whereas dealing with taxes or going back and forth 10 times on the floor plans or dealing with materials getting lost, that’s not fun, and that’s what she retired from. She kept the fun stuff.”
On her own podcast, she said that they’ve been through a lot of changes together during the course of the show, and that it had become difficult to find common ground.
“As we’ve gotten older, she got married, and I got married, and I’ve had kids; so many things have happened since the show started,” she said. “She retired. It’s really hard to maintain a good balance when you don’t really have a great base like we do, particularly in the microscope of the show, because it just creates so many more dynamics.”
Starsiak Hawk continued, “I’m trying to build an empire, she wants to slow down, and until we got on the same page with that and what that looked like, it was tough because I’m like, ‘Why are you going so slow?’ And she’s like, ‘Because I’m old and I wanna hang out and chill.'”