Before and After: HGTV’s “Good Bones” Takes a Dated 1950s House and Opens Up the Layout

Trends in the interior design world come and go, and there’s no better proof of that than what is revealed when renovating a dated home. In the latest episode of HGTV’s “Good Bones,” Karen E. Laine and Mina Starsiak worked on a house that needed some serious trend updating—starting with removing the wall to wall carpet.

The mother-daughter duo tackled this project as a personal favor to friend and team design assistant, MJ. He and his husband Andrew had recently purchased a 2-bedroom, 2.5-bath property in the Wolfington neighborhood of Indianapolis, where many homes were built in the 1950s. With an awkward layout, cramped rooms, and that carpet mentioned above, Laine and Starsiak worked to bring modern-meets-traditional style into the space that felt true to the couple. 

MJ and Andrew wanted to make the house a warm space to host family and friends. With a $60K budget to work with, the team narrowed down where they should focus their priorities and landed on the following: paint and update the exterior, open up the layout, update the flooring, and transform the sunroom. 

Speaking of the sunroom, it was one of the reasons MJ and Andrew fell in love with the house in the first place. The sunroom truthfully didn’t need much work done on it, as it already had great ceilings and windows that made the room feel airy and inviting.

MJ wanted stone flooring for the sunroom, which he believed existed underneath the wooden panels that came with the home. While that didn’t turn out to be the case, Laine and Starsiak were still able to pull off an affordable stone-like floor that MJ envisioned.

Laine and Starsiak also furnished the space with brand new pieces that followed the house’s overarching neutral palette of beiges, whites, and blacks. As an added bonus, the dream team added a Malm black fireplace that Andrew always dreamed of.

And then, there was the room that you saw when you first walked in—the living room. Laine and Starsiak ripped out the carpet that revealed an existing hardwood floor, which they used as a focus for the rest of the house’s flooring. That change alone made the space feel lighter, and knocking down the walls that connected the living room to the kitchen only enhanced that. 

One special touch in the living room was the built-in arched bookshelves that were installed. “A lot of what we’ve already done to the house is very, very modern, and I wanted to have some kind of design element that was more traditional or classic, and I think arched bookshelves will achieve that in a really beautiful way,“ MJ said in the epsiode. “I’m also obsessed with arches.” 

If you’d like to see the rest of the renovation—like the dated dollhouse kitchen that was transformed into the ultimate hangout space—tune in for this week’s episode. 

Good Bones airs Tuesdays at 9/8 central on HGTV.