Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty Images
HGTV’s Karen E. Laine Reveals the Strangest Items She Ever Found in Homes on ‘Good Bones’
Renovating historic homes has made for some very memorable discoveries for Good Bones’ Karen E. Laine. The HGTV personality revealed some of the strangest items she ever found while working on houses with her castmates.
During an episode of the “What’s Up Wilmington” podcast on October 31, the DIY expert dished on some of the weird things she has come across in “really old houses.”
“Most of them have been lived in for generations, and a lot of them have been abandoned, and now we’ve had squatters live in them or we had a hoarder living there, and now squatters live in them, so the one common denominator is poop,” Karen, 61, said. “They all have poop in them.”
She later joked about the difficulties of removing old toilets from the houses. “Nobody wants to take the toilet out; it’s a s–tty job,” she quipped
In the estimated 120 homes Karen has renovated on eight seasons of Good Bones with daughter Mina Starsiak Hawk, she found some other interesting things, including a piece of musical history.
“The cool thing that might actually be worth some money is Tad [Starsiak] and Austin [Aynes] were supposed to save a bathtub for me, and instead they threw it out the window and it broke,” she revealed.
The duo tried to pretend it didn’t happen but Karen figured out their blunder pretty quickly. To make it up to her, they presented her with something extremely valuable that they had found in the wall.
“Austin comes to me with this sheet of paper that I later learned is called an autograph,” the former lawyer explained. “It is a piece of sheet music handwritten by the musician, signed by the musician.”
She continued, “It turns out Albert Von Tilzer wrote ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’ and that’s what this is,” adding, “And he lived in Indianapolis and he hung out in Bates-Hendricks where this house was, and apparently, he had given the sheet music to someone who lived in the house who then put it away somewhere safe, and so now I have this piece of sheet music and it’s mounted on acid-free paper and it’s under museum glass, and I don’t know what it’s worth; I have no idea.”
At the time that the piece of music was found, Karen was still married to her fourth husband, Roger Rominger.
“My last husband said, ‘We’re not selling that,’ because somebody offered to buy it, and I said, ‘Oh, Oh we’re not? OK,’ but I would sell it now,” she explained. “If anybody wants it, let me know what you’ll pay for it.”
Since then, Karen and Roger filed a joint petition for legal separation on April 26, 2022, according to court records viewed by Closer. On January 13, 2023, Roger filed a petition to convert their legal separation into dissolution. The case is still ongoing, with an upcoming court date scheduled for November 27.
Karen still has not looked into how much the sheet music would be worth today. The home improvement star also revealed a “really weird” thing she once found in a home — concealed shoes, a European tradition widely believed to prevent evil spirits.
“The weird thing in this house, they found the shoe, took the shoe out of the house and then the story I’ve been told is seven different workers had gotten injured on the job,” she explained, before revealing that she put a prayer in the shoe and put it back where it was found.
