Two-and-a-half years after Mina Starsiak Hawk shocked HGTV fans by deciding to walk away from her hit show, “Good Bones,” the Indianapolis-based renovation expert is opening up about what truly led to the show’s demise.
On April 30, 2026, Starsiak Hawk sat down with fellow HGTV star Alison Victoria for a new episode of her “Pap Smear Podcast,” and shared how “disappointing” it was to end “Good Bones” due to issues with family members on the show — and why everything unraveled.
Mina Starsiak Hawk Says She Chose to Protect Her Mental & Physical Health
Starsiak Hawk co-starred on “Good Bones” with her mom, Karen E. Laine, which worked well at first, she told Victoria, but grew increasingly hard due to their complicated interpersonal dynamics.
“The talent was great,” Victoria told her, revealing she was a big fan of the show. “Your family is insane in the best way. But, obviously, it’s your real life.”
“I didn’t end the show because I didn’t want to do the show,” Starsiak Hawk told her. “I ended the show because I could not mentally and emotionally handle the relationships, and it was affecting me physically.”
“I was having like, you know, stomach issues and just all kinds of stuff,” the mom of two revealed. “You know, it was such a good show, and you don’t want to change a good thing. (But) just trying to adjust it was not really on the table.”
Starsiak Hawk said the stress of filming with her mom and other family members also took a toll on her husband, fitness trainer Steve Hawk, who’d try to comfort her every night.
She recalled, “I would come home four days, five days a week from filming, just crying like, ‘This is so hard. I can’t do this anymore. I don’t know what to do.’ And then go back to work the next day and do it again and put on a happy face. So, it was a lot for him, too.”
Mina Starsiak Hawk Calls Herself a ‘Terrible Human Manager’ After Trying to Oversee Family on ‘Good Bones’
In the weeks after HGTV announced “Good Bones” would end following its eighth season, which premiered in the fall of 2023, Starsiak Hawk admitted that tensions had grown so bad on set that she and her mom got into a “knock-down, drag-out” fight.
She told People at the time that while all of their conflicts were edited out of the show, she and Laine were emotionally in “some of the most challenging places I felt we’ve been.” That tension was compounded by having increasingly rocky relationships with other family and friends in the cast, too.
Starsiak Hawk told Victoria on her podcast that when the show was first put together, with HGTV excited about featuring her and Laine’s mother-daughter renovation business, she quickly hired people in her circle of family and friends who were capable of helping.
“I went from doing all the work myself, and my mom doing a lot of it, to being on camera all the time, and having to grow a team like really, really fast,” Starsiak Hawk recalled. “That was uncomfortable. And it was mostly, like, family and friends hustling, trying to figure out how to do stuff. When you don’t have time, you’re not vetting anybody — whether they’re family, friends, or strangers. ‘You’ll help and I can afford you? Great. Get on the team.'”
HGTVStarsiak Hawk acknowledged she didn’t realize just how long the show would last, nor how hard it would be to work with family and friends daily and in the public eye, including managing money, setting schedules, and fixing mistakes.
“I am a terrible human manager,” she admitted. “I should not manage other humans because I’m just like, ‘Well, that’s just stupid. I’ll just do it myself because you’re gonna do it wrong and it’ll take me more time to fix it and I’ll just do it myself.’ But you can’t really do that. It’s not sustainable.”
Starsiak Hawk and Laine starred in separate spin-off episodes of “Good Bones” in 2024, working on different personal projects. She has said that they are in a better place emotionally, now that they’re not working together.
You can catch Starsiak Hawk competing on the seventh season of “Rock the Block,” partnered with former NFL Super Bowl champ Vernon Davis, airing Monday nights on HGTV.
