Karen E. Laine is embracing her new North Carolina home — with a familiar face from Good Bones.
In an exclusive preview clip from Good Bones’ new spinoff shared with PEOPLE, the home renovation expert learns a local dance in Wilmington, where she’s transforming a beach bungalow.
She invites Austin Aynes, a longtime member of her team from the original Good Bones, for a lesson in shag dancing, which she explains is a variety of swing that’s popular on the North Carolina coast.
“If I’m going to live in Wilmington, I need to do the Wilmington dance, so that’s why we’re here,” Laine tells Aynes, noting that the dance has a “dig your feet in the sand” move, because it’s meant to be done on the beach.
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Laine and Aynes practice their steps with a pair of instructors, and afterward they nail the moves with each other, which leaves Laine smiling and clapping.
“When I come, I work until it’s dark,” she explains of her time spent traveling to Wilmington from her main residence in Indianapolis. “I haven’t really gotten to have much fun yet. This shag dancing is the first fun I’ve had.”
Laine enjoys the dance so much that she says it could become a weekly hobby.
“I feel like that could be one of my Wilmington activities, is on a Friday night, show up and just find people who will tolerate dancing with me,” she says.
In the show’s previous episode, Laine reflected on her family life and the freedom of retirement.
“I’m not working for a paycheck anymore,” she said. “I retired in 2019, and I can do anything I want.”
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Laine started the business Two Chicks and a Hammer with her daughter and Good Bones costar, Mina Starsiak Hawk, in 2007. Laine stepped back from the company five years ago, but continued to appear on Good Bones until it wrapped its initial eight-season run in October 2023.
“I’ve been doing everything I want to do,” Laine went on. “I’ve been doing some landscaping projects. I’ve been doing some lawyering.”
During a conversation with Aynes and two other cast members from the original Good Bones, MJ Coyle and Cory Miller, Laine shared what inspired her purchase of the 120-year-old bungalow.
“I am tired of Indiana winter,” she told the trio. “And I had this idea: Wouldn’t it be nice to retire in Wilmington?”
“I went there once and I loved it,” she continued. “So I went back in January. It was 80 degrees during the day. So I got on the interwebs and I found a house for sale and I bought it.”
Austin Aynes/Instagram
However, she noted that she had her work cut out for her with the fixer-upper, which was held up by a jack on a “pile of rickety bricks.”
“This house is like one of our original Good Bones houses — just wretched,” she added.
“There’s part of this foundation that’s sitting on air,” Laine said. “It needs a lot of love, but we can fix anything.”
The new series focuses on “new beginnings” as Laine and Starsiak Hawk’s lives’ “evolve past their time renovating homes in Indianapolis” and they embark on projects in separate states, according to HGTV.
Starsiak Hawk previously revealed on her podcast, Mina AF, that there were tensions between her and her family while the final season of the original show was airing in 2023. She said she wasn’t “in a great place” with either Laine or her brother Tad.
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While Laine’s beach getaway is the focus of the second and third episodes of the new season, its 90-minute premiere focused on Mina’s renovation of a lake house to enjoy with her husband, Steve Hawk, and their two children: 5-year-old Jack and 3-year-old Charlie.
In the episode, Mina said the lakeside retreat would “feel very healing for Steve because he’s lost so much.”
Steve’s mother died from stomach cancer in 2018, and six months later, his father died unexpectedly after falling down the stairs. In 2020, his younger sister, Stefanie, died from ethanol poisoning.
“He’s going through life the best way he can after just some really, really epic loss in a very, very short amount of time,” Mina explained. “And because his time with his family was cut short, that’s really why we wanted this lake house for Jack and Charlie — really, for the long term, for the memories, for the experiences. So that’s, I think, why it’s really important to both of us.”
The third and final episode of Good Bones‘ ninth season, “Karen Gets Colorful,” will air Wednesday, Aug. 28, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HGTV.
