Mina Starsiak Hawk says she and her mother Karen E. Laine are finally “good” after a public rift that exploded during the final season of Good Bones.
The HGTV star told News Of Losangeles the healing has been slow but steady: “It took us a lot of time to get there, so I think it takes a lot of time to kind of get out of it as well.”
A Rocky Road to Reconciliation
The mother-daughter tension first surfaced in August 2023 when Starsiak Hawk admitted on her podcast Mina AF that she wasn’t “in a great place” with Laine or her brother Tad.
Cameras caught the strain. While filming the season-eight premiere, the pair had just finished “a knockdown drag-out [fight] during demo.”
“I was like, ‘I wonder if anyone’s going to be able to tell,'” she recalled. “And of course, you can’t because that’s the idea. People … that’s not why they’re tuning in to watch Good Bones.”
Holiday Reunion Marks New Chapter
Today the mood is lighter. “We were all together for the holidays, so we’re all amicable,” she said. “We’re not like best friends that braid each other’s hair on Saturday nights or anything, but no, it’s good.”
The turnaround follows years of shared history. Starsiak Hawk and Laine launched Two Chicks and a Hammer in 2007. Laine stepped back from daily operations in 2019, yet continued appearing on the show until its finale in October 2023.
Spinoff Showed Separate Paths
HGTV tested the waters with a three-episode spinoff in August 2024 titled Good Bones: New Beginnings. The limited series tracked mother and daughter on opposite coasts:
- Episode 1: Mina transforms an Indiana lake house into a family retreat for son Jack, 7, and daughter Charlie, 5.
- Episodes 2-3: Karen renovates a Wilmington, N.C. fixer-upper into her dream beach house, then listed it in October 2024.
Looking Back, Moving Forward
Ahead of the original show’s finale, Mina reflected on fame’s price. “I think I knew … that this was going to be hard and it was going to challenge relationships, because when you put anything under a spotlight, in a pressure cooker, there’s the opportunity to explode,” she said on the podcast. “And I myself am not stable enough to not explode at times.”
She described her family as “a whole complicated organization” filled with “people with so many different issues, weaknesses, things left to learn.”
Her takeaway: “I just wish I had known how bad it could be.”
Next Stop: Rock the Block
In 2026 Starsiak Hawk returns to HGTV as a competitor on Rock the Block season seven. She teams with retired NFL player-turned-actor Vernon Davis in the network’s first celebrity-designer pairing.
Other teams include:
- Scott McGillivray and singer Brooke Hogan
- Taniya Nayak and 98 Degrees singer Drew Lachey
- Kim Wolfe and Survivor alum Chelsea Meissner
The season premieres early 2026 on HGTV.
