'Good Bones' Stars Mina and Karen Faced Tension in Their Relationship — How Are They Doing Now?

Back in 2007, a defense attorney named Karen E. Laine started rehabbing old houses in Indianapolis alongside her waitress daughter, Mina Starsiak Hawk. The following year, the pair opened up their own business called Two Chicks and a Hammer.

One day, a talent representative from HGTV noticed their work on Facebook. The mother-daughter duo ended up landing their own show on the network, which would be called Good Bones. The series ran from 2016 to 2023, and it turned Karen and Mina into bona fide stars.

But by the time the series ended, there was talk of tension between its two leading ladies. What happened, and how is Karen and Mina's relationship today? Here's what we know.

During Good Bones' run on HGTV, viewers marveled at what Karen and Mina could accomplish together while they ran their business. But over time, especially as the series was winding down, viewers couldn't help but notice that there seemed to be tension between mom and daughter.

Not only did the two interact less and less on the show, but they also seemed to disagree on more and more things, including budgets and decor. Their priorities also seemed to be in different places, and Mina expressed wanting to scale things back with Two Chicks and a Hammer. (Karen had stepped back from the company in 2019, though she remained on Good Bones.)

In August 2023, two months before the Good Bones series finale aired, Mina revealed on her podcast, Mina AF, that she "wasn't in a great place" in terms of her relationship with her mom, her half-brother Tad, and her brother William. The subject came up while Mina was talking about her son Jack's fifth birthday party, as she wondered whether to invite certain family members.

"No one's punching the other person in the face by any means," Mina said on the podcast. "We all just exist because it's what makes my dad [Casey Starsiak] happy. And that's that's fine. That's been fine for a long time. It's fine for a lot of families. I just don't think it's fine anymore."

While Mina didn't specify whether there were any particular incidents that caused the rift, fans on Reddit theorized that Mina and Karen simply needed a break from each other. Some even speculated that Mina had changed with fame. As for Mina's relationships with her brothers, some viewers recalled that Tad seemed to often ignore Mina's instructions. It's possible this may have contributed to their issues.

The same month that the show ended, in October 2023, Mina also announced they were closing down their retail shop, Two Chicks District Co. (though Mina later announced her plans to reopen in a new location). Also that month, Mina mentioned on her podcast that she'd gotten a text from her mom, asking if they should maybe talk. "We do not talk. We haven’t in a long time," Mina explained.

In January 2024, Mina revealed on her podcast that she and her husband Steve hadn't celebrated Thanksgiving with a big family gathering, because she "felt like the fallout from not being there was going to be more manageable than the bad feelings I would have from being there and sitting at a table and pretending everything was OK." She said that she and Steve instead opted to visit her dad and stepmom before the holiday.

Mina explained that she was "just going to move on mentally and make the decisions that I think are right, do the things that I think are best, and if other people don’t, then they’ve shown me who they are and where they stand and I can make my own decisions from there."

Fast-forward to August 2024, and HGTV debuted a Good Bones spinoff series called Good Bones: New Beginnings. But, based on the fact that the show follows Karen and Mina separately, some fans have taken this to mean that the mom and daughter are still not on the best terms now.

In the three-week limited series, which premiered on HGTV on Aug. 14 at 9 p.m. EST, viewers get to see Karen work on a beach bungalow in Wilmington, N.C., while Mina tackles a lakeside home north of Indianapolis. The first two episodes focus on Mina's renovation, while the final two episodes are all about Karen.

Hopefully, the time apart will be good for them.