 Hey, girlfriends, I'm Bianca Renee, and you're watching Bianca Renee Today. And today, I'm finally going to talk about our new home. If you have missed the news, then you obviously are not following on Instagram, so we gotta fix that right now. At Ms. Bianca Renee on Instagram and TikTok. But, yes, Royce and I have purchased our first home. It's a very, very big deal. It's a very big adult decision. The most adult thing we've done. Maybe having kids is kind of adultish too, but yeah, it could be a pretty scary process. So today I want to talk all about it. I asked you guys on Instagram if you had any questions for me, so I'm going to answer your questions and also kind of just like take you through the motions, like why we moved, what we were looking for with buying a new house, the deal breakers, things that people don't tell you, the upgrades that we did, things that I would avoid, what I do it again. There's a lot, there's a lot to it. So, let's get started. I'm also bare faced, so I thought I would actually do something while I'm talking to you. So it's gonna be like a get ready with me new home, Shabamble. Now, I wish I had some new makeup for you, but I don't. I definitely wanna get on that, what's everyone talking about? The makeup by Mario Foundation. Everyone's raving about it. I gotta try that next. I'm gonna start off with just, oh, let's do some Super Goop sunblock, Nars Soft Matte Primer, and the best foundation of all time, the Nars Soft Matte Complete Foundation. And the color, Hohain, I hate my color name. So, why do we move? Well, we were out growing where we were. We actually lived in Royce's parents' guest house. So, let's just start with that. When you hear someone bought a new house, you might have like a sense of FOMO, like you start to compare people, you think, you know, I wanna be in a new house, why am I not in my new house? Especially living in California, it's like almost impossible to do. So, instead of comparing, let me give you our true backstory so you can understand even why I believe we weren't even able to buy the house that we're in. So, we lived at Royce's parents' guest house. Is it cool to live with your in-laws or parents in your 30s? No, maybe if you're like dating, it's like a, what's going on here? But when you live in California, when you tell people that they're like, oh my God, that's amazing, good for you. Stay as long as you can, because everyone in California knows how ridiculous it is to live here, like rent and mortgage. It's just a lot. So, we were extremely fortunate and blessed in the fact that we were able to live there rent-free so that we can save up and actually have enough for a down payment for our home. So, that alone was a huge blessing. We know we are very privileged in that sense to where we were able to be in a situation where we could save up for as long as we did. So, I would think it'd be kind of funny when you guys would see like their backyard, like, oh my God, backyard goals and backyard flex. And I'm like, yeah, I mean, it's definitely a great backyard, but it's not ours. Did I prime? Ah, I didn't prime. This is almost empty. Guess I liked it. So, we lived there for maybe about two years and it was just a two bedroom guest house. I mean, it was a very nice guest house. It was basically a house. The master was upstairs and then had one bedroom downstairs. I never liked having Jaylin's room being downstairs, like by the front door for obvious reasons. So, that always made me a little nervous and I've just always been excited to have either us downstairs or us on the same floor as our kid. But after Kylo got here, it was just getting a little cramped. We got a lot of things. So, we were just really outgrowing the space and we turned the garage into my studio in his office and we were just running out of space. So, we thought it was time. We start looking and in California, bruh. Slim Pickens out here. You can't find anything relatively nice. I mean, for my standards. I would just keep finding examples of like, you know, let me try to show you some. Here's some examples of like, this is considered a million dollar home. A million dollar home. When you think of a million dollar house, you don't think of like old wallpaper. You don't think of missing floor, holes in the wall. Needs to be upgraded things for like a million dollars. And that's all I kept finding in like the area that we want to live in. So, we kept searching and searching and everybody kept trying to tell us like, you know, it's your first house. It's your starter home. Like, you're gonna keep working. You're gonna save up. You're gonna get your dream home eventually. It doesn't have to be the best home ever. As your first house. Which is true. But I kind of kept telling myself, I'm just not gonna feel good about investing into something that I don't love. And yes, there are fixer uppers and you can upgrade. But when the fixer upper base price is like a million dollars, I'm not paying a million dollars for a fixer upper. If it was like, I don't know, 500,000, then we could put money into it. But a $500,000 four to five bedroom house in California just does not exist. It kind of got to the point where we had no choice but to do new construction. I didn't want to. Everyone that I know that has done new construction, they're like, I've done it and I'm never doing it again. And I was like, eh, can't be that bad. Now that I've done it, I get it. It's not that bad. There are definitely some cool things about it. Would I do it again? No, for our next home, I'm hoping that we will just find it and it could have minimal upgrades to do. So no, this is not our forever home, but it's also not like what people would consider like a starter home because fortunately it is really nice. So I've always been like, I rather just work harder and make more to get the house that I want versus just buying something to buy something that I like hate. This is the most money that we've ever spent ever. So if I'm gonna spend this much money, I wanna feel happy about my purchase. I wanna get in and be like, all right, this is gonna be work. The skin is looking real good. I just went to Mary Scott's skincare. I did derma planning. So there is not a hair in sight. Okay, so I'm not gonna tell you where we move for obvious safety reasons, but we did stay in Southern California. As much as it would be amazing to have the prices of Texas, Florida, Atlanta, let alone any of the states in the middle, I just did not want to leave my family. I just really can't. For Royce and I, we really gotta be by our parents at this time and I don't want to leave, what was that? All my friends are here. I've never lived in any other state ever. Even for college, I went to a college that was almost walking distance from my house. I've always just been a valley girl and my biggest move at the time was Glendale. Not to mention the weather here is amazing. And that's what we're really paying for. We don't really have seasons. Like I always say, we have pre-summer, summer, mid-summer, post-summer. And that's about it. So, although TikTok will really make you think about leaving because you can buy a house for what a down payment is in California, fully upgraded, large rooms, high ceilings, you know, all that jazz, but I just always told myself, you just gotta work harder. You just gotta make more money because you're not leaving. Just stressed, no big deal. And if I didn't have family ties here, it'd be great. It's smart. It's the smart decision to go to a place that's more affordable period. Like I can't say I'm making a smart decision, but I'm just doing what's best for me and my mental, like all my friends are here. It's just, I don't wanna leave. That's kind of just all there is to that. Being an influencer, I could put up a camera anywhere. I would miss out on some beauty events. They're depending on where I went, but I can still work from home. So could Roy's, kind of. So anyway, stayed in Southern California, still wanted to be relatively close to our family, aka our babysitters because we need the help. Now I'm using my Laura Mercier setting powder because this is all I've ever used to set my concealer. Oh, the concealer was the L'Oreal infallible. It's just top tier. So now that we're in our new home, we did get a five bedroom home. So now I have an office, Roy's has an office. Jaylen has his room. We have the primary, which is not called the master anymore because that's racist. And then we have another bedroom downstairs. Technically Jaylen and Kylo could have their own rooms, but we want to make them share. I mean, I had to share until I was 16. And I was so excited to get my own room. Two boys, I want them to be able to bond and they could just, you know, just be in the same room. And then that room, we're actually trying to figure out what we want that room to be. Could be a guest room, but at least we have it, you know, if and when our family grows, we got it. We honestly did not even need the fifth bedroom. We could have been content with four, but the way that this new construction was set up, you had to choose between it being a den or you had to upgrade to making it a full bedroom. If it's just an open room with like sliding doors, that's considered a den. But if you want a bathroom and a closet, then it makes it a bedroom. If it was just a den, it would just be this random open space that we wouldn't use. We wouldn't use it as a formal dining room. No one sits in a formal living room. That's a waste of space. I wouldn't want it to be our office because you'd walk in the house and then it would just be hair products everywhere because my office is never clean. I didn't want like Spider-Man first thing you walk in as Royce's office. So I'm just like, we need this to be like a closed off room or it's just gonna be a wasted space. So we did upgrade to add the fifth bedroom, which really just meant turning in the complimentary den space into a closed off room with a door and a closet and then a third bathroom downstairs. So I'm really excited to have my own office space to film it instead of working in the garage. You guys know, I would always talk about like the weather. It would either be really hot in the summer and I'm sweating or I'd be freezing filming in the winter because there was no AC in the garage. So now I'm in a nice like neutral environment and it's great. Let me get to some of your questions that you asked me on Instagram. Let's see what y'all, what y'all wanna know. Did you have floor plans to choose from or did you tell them what you want and they designed it after? With new construction, that does not mean that you're just buying a piece of dirt land and then you just go ham and you're like, this is exactly what I want. No, you actually have very, very, very little freedom when it comes to these new builds. This particular community had three models to choose from. So you can choose plan one, two or three. That's it. I think plan one had like the master downstairs, plan two had the master upstairs. Oh, excuse me, primary bedroom. Plan three, what was the difference? They're just like different layouts. So maybe like the bathroom will be a different way or one might have a bigger closet or the stairs will be configured in a different way. So you choose your favorite plan and then you can do little customizations from there but you can't change the structure of the house at all. So our whole community, we're just a mix of one, two and threes and we all have the same house. It's pretty cookie cutter. The contractors don't wanna do anything fancy. They're just keeping it as basic as possible and they're just making the same house over and over again. So when it came to upgrades, we kept it pretty minimal. We did upgrade for the fifth bedroom which was turned the den into the bedroom. We paid for the sliding doors in our backyard. So it comes with just like normal, like with the handle and you open it like this and it's like smaller. I've always wanted that indoor outdoor feel. So we paid extra for the sliding doors to like slide into each other so you can kind of open up that whole wall and it just really opens up the whole family room space. So that was a structural upgrade that we did and I'm really glad. Once we have a backyard, I'll be even more excited because backyard is not included if you guys have been following me on Instagram. So when you buy a house, you have minimal plants in the front yard and your backyard is just dirt. You don't get any grass, at least in California, nothing. I think that is wild. I didn't even know that was a thing but when I found out I was like, well, it is what it is. Let's say you're gonna go into the new construction. You pick the phase you want, then you go in and you see which ones are available. Then they show you the price and they show you the square footage. Square footage is kind of the same for each one but your lot size is different. So the lot size is like your backyard and everything and some, like if you get a corner lot, you get a really big backyard and a deal breaker for me was the backyard. I am an entertainer. I love to host parties. I wanna be able to have Jalen's birthday party in the backyard. I want a place for my kids to play so it was very important for me to have a backyard and I literally chose the houses based off of how big the backyard was. So we have a little timeline. We decided to go for it in May and then you go into the office and they make you all excited. Congratulations, you just bought a house. But I was like, I didn't have that actual excitement feeling because you don't really know the price of your house yet. You're just agreeing to pay for the land but you don't really know what it's gonna look like yet because upgrades aren't included and you don't really know I personally didn't know all the details of what the upgrades entailed because you don't go to the design center until like a month later. You're signing the paperwork because they're also kinda rushed me because they said you need to make a decision by tomorrow because we're starting to build tomorrow. So if you want any structural changes, you have to decide today. And because we wanted the doors and the fifth bedroom those are considered structural changes. We had an option of doing like that huge shower. I don't know if you guys saw me doing a walkthrough a long time ago and I showed you like this gorgeous huge shower, that's the house we bought. But instead of doing the upgrade of the full shower we did shower and tub because we got kids they take a lot of baths. So it just kind of made more sense and it was like $13,000 cheaper to do the included shower and tub versus a really nice big shower. But if we wanted to make those decisions or like a patio off the master we didn't do that either we'd have to make all those decisions like right there on the spot. So we ended up signing, we bought our lot that's the base price. But we did not know how much our payments were gonna be each month. We didn't know how much the upgrades were gonna cost. So I honestly felt just like really uneasy because I just agreed to buy something and I don't even know how much it's gonna cost me per month because that's gonna be depending on the final cost of the house and there are loan and interest rates right now. Don't get me started. Interest rates is also gonna have to be a whole other video. I was like, whoo-hoo, what did we just do? So it's not until like it's supposed to be sooner. I think we were backed up but it was like a month if not a couple weeks later to where then you go to the design center. In the design center you're now picking your floors. Like do you want Harvard floor? Do you want carpet? Do you want vinyl? Do you want laminate? Do you want granite counters? Do you want quartz? Do you want to pay for the upgrades to have lights in your house? Oh yes, lights are not included. They're not. They're not included in any of the bedrooms. Basically, if it'd be weird to have a lamp there, those are included. So there's lights in the kitchen, above the stairs and the bathroom because you just wouldn't put a lamp like in your kitchen. But if you could put a lamp, they ain't giving you no lights. Upgrade should be another video too. There's just so much to talk about. We ended up upgrading our countertops in our kitchen because it came with a black and like gray speckled countertop. Just something very standard, but as an influencer creating content, everything looks better on like a white clean backdrop. So I needed that upgrade so that I could film in the kitchen and it could be like Instagrammably pretty. Oh my Anastasia Browis is gone. And we upgraded the floor and the entryway because it would have been tile and that just seemed like the kids would fall on that and be really painful. And it's really expensive to take out. So at first I was kind of bummed about all carpet and I was like, oh, still moving on. We're going to get the laminates or vinyl. It's going to be really nice. But now that we're in like, I love having carpet with the kids. Jalen's always rolling around. Kylo's going to have to learn how to walk and crawl. So it's just going to be better to have. And then once they're done spitting up on things and spilling everything, then we'll upgrade to nicer floors. So total upgrades were the doors, the fifth bedroom, the countertops. We changed the floor right when you walk into the house instead of tile, we did like vinyl. Oh, we also paid for the open tread on the stairs. So it just would have been a wall. Like when you look up, but now it has like the pillars. And that was it. One thing that I had to continue to tell myself is that we don't have to have the perfect Pinterest home on day one. Like my Pinterest board is stacked but you got to take things slow and you're not going to have to decorate your whole house in one day. And I was trying to do that. We're like, whatever we don't do now, we could always do later. Things we're going to do now are just the things that would be really annoying to do later or really expensive to tear out. When will you do a house tour? I don't think I'm going to do a house tour just for safety reasons. I will show you rooms individually as they progress. Cause I do want to share how we're going to decorate the boys room. I want to show you how I'm going to do my office. Oh, that reminds me, the next challenge. This week's challenge is going to be the clutter challenge. I am doing this really for myself because I need to unpack this office. The whole house is unpacked except for my hair products and my makeup products. My office is in shambles. It's not a very happy warm inviting place to be filming and get, you know, be creative. So I have to unpack this room. I'm sure you have a little nook and cranny in your house that you've been neglecting. So we are going to tackle the area of our homes that we've been neglecting. It could be a jump drawer that you've just been like, oh, I'm going to go through it or maybe you need to do your closet or maybe it's that towel closet or maybe it's the garage if you're real brave. I want you to tackle whatever little part of your home that is just cluttered, that one closet, that's what we're going to do this week. I know you don't want to do it but after you do it, you're going to thank me. So let me know if you accept this week's clutter challenge. We're going to get a little more organized this week. But yeah, I want to go in like full DIY mode. I bought a Brad and Naylor gun while I got one for Christmas from my sister and I'm excited to do some things and paint. The whole house is just white, white. Everything is white and I'm really mad at it but I at least want to do the boys room. I think I'm going to tackle doing a closet, a DIY built-in closet. All like home decor content is coming so you're going to see the house. I'm just not going to walk you through like, this is how you get to our kids bedroom from the front door because that's not safe. Why don't homes in California come with finished backyards? That's a great question. So whoever has the answer to that, I'd like to speak to them. Did you sell the house you previously lived in? No, because we were in the guest house, it's still there. What's your favorite thing about your new home? Surprisingly, the favorite thing about our new home is our view. The view from our bedroom is fire. And when we first bought the house, it had like an upgraded price versus this other lot that I liked because of the partial view. And I'm just like, I don't care about a view. Like I'm not paying more money for the view and then we end up having to get this one instead. And now that I have the view, I love it. We need to get window treatment because it's a hell of bright in the morning and our kids can't nap in there because it's just too bright. But I call it like my godly screensaver. It's like God is changing my screensaver of my view every day. Every sunset, every sunrise, the colors, the clouds. Like it's different every time. So it's so beautiful and I just love looking at it. And hopefully once I'm done getting these estimates on our dirt backyard, my backyard will be my favorite part of the house. Have you met any neighbors yet? Actually, no. Like our area is so new but the house across the street and next to us are still for sale. So every time we see like the sales team showing a family, I'm like out the window being all nosy, hoping that it's a family like with kids around the same age as our kids. So I'm that nosy neighbor right now. Like who's gonna move in? Who's gonna move in? We only have someone like across the diagonal and then maybe like two houses down. We've done like general ways but haven't really met everyone yet. And there's not really many people to meet yet because this area is still very new. We have learned so much from this home buying process. And it is a process we bought in May. We were supposed to move in by November like 17th and the one thing that everybody tried to say about new constructions like they're always late. There's gonna be delays, delays, delays. And I was just praying that wasn't gonna be the case. But on the other side, that's kind of convenient is like, I think we had to put down 15,000 just to hold like the land, like to claim our spot. I think I paid like maybe another 4,000 for upgrades like the upgrade deposit. And then you don't pay anything else until the house is done. So it kind of gives you some more time to save but you also want to get in your house. And if you aren't in the situation where we were able to just be at someone's house until we were ready, that could really suck. Like our neighbors, their house was delayed so they had to rent an Airbnb for like a month or something. So fortunately we didn't have like to be pressed to move out which is why wouldn't you new construction in because then we'd have to like sell this house on time or do a rent back. It would get complicated if you are trying to sell your house and get on a wait list for a new home. We signed papers in May and then we were supposed to move in November like 17th and then we were delayed but only by a month. So we moved in by mid December. So we were in by Christmas, which is what I wanted. We thought we'd be at by Thanksgiving but with that to happen. But even a month is not as bad. I've heard some horror stories online. It's been like eight month delay. Like India Batson for example, she just bought a new home. We were so excited for her and she bought her house way before I did. And I ended up moving in before her. Granted her house has so many cool upgrades that we weren't even allowed to ask about. Ooh, I wanna use my Urban Decay. I can't put Chapstick on with this or it will not stay. So as you can see, we have a lot to talk about. I could do a whole video just on upgrades. I could do a whole video on things that they don't tell you about new construction. I could do a whole video on like decorating our bedroom or decorating the boys room. I wanna do one on how we're gonna design their closets. My backyard is gonna be a whole thing. We've been getting estimates from $20,000 to $70,000 for the same exact job. Things to look out for, how much does turf cost? How much do papers cost? How long does it take? Some guys are telling me they could do the backyard in two days and the next guy will say it will take a month to do the same thing. You guys let me know what you want to know about. If you're looking to buy a home anytime soon, what questions do you have? Do you wanna know about like lenders, interest rates, and HOA, and mellow rules, and down payment, and like, there's so many things. All I need from you guys is to pray for your girl. Pray that we can continue to afford this home. Pray that the brand deals will keep rolling in. You guys are gonna keep commenting, liking, and viewing anything that's sponsored. Anytime you see a sponsored post, just be like, Bianca was able to pay her mortgage this month. Good for her! If you don't see any sponsored posts, you must pray. Okay, my baby's crying. He is hungry. I think that's all I could really cover in this video. I wanna just make full videos on all the other topics. Those videos are not too long. But let me know if you're gonna join the Clutter Challenge. We're gonna tackle a space in our home. Comment below, what are you gonna tackle? Is it gonna be that closet? Is it gonna be your bedroom? Is it gonna be the junk drawer? Is it gonna be the garage? Let me know what you're going to organize this week. And if you're looking forward to more home content, please like, actually let me know. Leave me a comment because I am kind of transitioning from hair and beauty to home. I was able to do kind of both today, but I really want to share my home journey with you guys. So if you're excited, please let me know. I just need a little bit of confirmation from you guys that you're not all going to leave me if I don't make a video on hair products. Make sure to follow me on Instagram and TikTok. I've already started some of the things I don't tell you about new construction videos on TikTok at Ms. Bianca and A. But I will see you guys next time. Thanks for watching Bianca Renee Today.