Hi, Good Bones fans! It’s business time on the HGTV show, the episode of the season when Two Chicks and a Hammer handles a commercial space for one of Mina’s friends. This time, it’s Alysse Popov, who owns beauty studio Ova and works a lot in the bridal space.
Popov said yes to the address of a Fountain Square house and bought it to expand her business into Ova Lofts. The concept will bring together a group of beauty studios and a salon under one roof, along with a kitchen and a walk-up coffee window for the public—thanks, Alysse! She paid $290,000 for the house and will put $300,000 into it. The mortgage will be $6,000, and the rent from the other businesses should more than cover it. The timeline is four months, because clients are waiting.
Cory and Mina visit the cottage, and it’s adorable, with ornamental woodwork on the exterior. Alysse says yes to the character but, “It’s not you, it’s me,” to the gray, maroon, and navy paint colors in favor of a modern look. Cory says, “Argh! Ugh! No! No, it didn’t!” when Mina’s pee drips on his head in the basement, where the pipe coming from the upstairs bathroom she just used is also taking a leak.
Time out: Is anyone else fooled by these extra-long promos for Bargain Block that air during each Good Bones episode? HGTV plops a scene from the program into a commercial break, and I think the recording has gone haywire and skipped to an entirely different show. Not cool, HGTV. You give me a heart attack every week.
A city inspector nixes Mina’s plan to add a window to Alysse’s office, bringing to mind the September 8 story in the Indianapolis Business Journal (paywalled) about Mina’s ongoing struggles with permit roadblocks and her belief that some decisions were personal, which contributed to her decision to stop filming Good Bones. In the time it took me to type that last sentence, the health department has become involved, mandating a walled-off kitchen so people won’t walk through it while food and drinks are being prepared. They settle for a railing, and, for some reason, it adds three weeks to the timeline.
Alysse doesn’t freak out, and she, Mina, and MJ move on to the pretty part—design. Lots of soft pink, gold accents, and pops of pattern, plus some quirkiness, will make it feel like a glam, high-end experience, MJ says. But one of the countertop samples looks like it has coffee stains. It’s white with thick brown splotches, and I can’t get “latte spill” out of my head. They visit a place selling stone countertop remnants, a bargain-hunter’s paradise that MD calls a “rock orphanage.”
Back at the house, Tad enters stage left, not as a demo leader but as a contractor. He has spun off a construction business and will build a deck and an ADA-compliant handrail. This, coupled with the tax-accountant girlfriend he introduced earlier this season: Aww, the Tadmanian Devil is growing up.
The reveal shows how beautiful light mauve walls and glossy “mermaid” tiles can look. The coffee-stain stone made it in, but ignore that and look at all the beautiful curves—bar stools, double doors between rooms, oval mirrors, the entry’s console table, and an Art Deco sofa are a few of the elements with voluptuous lines, if you’re looking for a design trend. The bird wings on the flamingo wallpaper look like eyelashes, perfectly themed to Popov’s business. The $1,000 candelabra chandelier from Home Depot that Mina said she will also be buying for her own house is sure to start flying off shelves. Get it before it’s backordered.
Another showstopper is the Ova Lofts sign in the front yard. It’s made from strips of rusted metal, and Karen pulls the deep red from the material (and a nearby Japanese maple) to create simple coordinated landscaping.
Alysse tears up, saying she started the business from her couch, and now she has all this. Perhaps one day she’ll even have a TV show of her own.
