nightmare

I see on the Expat Focus forum that ITV wants to make a new series investigating the housing woes of Brits abroad: people with builder horror stories, planning permission nightmares and the like.

It is a common lament among expatriates. Virtually every ‘move abroad to a rustic farmhouse’ book to have appeared in recent years (Under the Tuscan Sun, Driving Over Lemons, The Olive Farm, you know the type) seems to be filled with their renovation disasters, as if it’s a prerequisite for publication.

Wary of facing similar reconstruction nightmares, my wife and I opted instead to buy a new-build house when we moved to Spain. Little did we know what hassles it would produce.

For starters, the house was two months late in completion. Not bad really, by Spanish standards. Unfortunately, that also meant we had a house signing and new baby within two days of each other. Far from ideal.   

And very soon after we found there were problems with rising damp (in the house that is, not the baby). Fortunately, it has been rectified by the developer … although it was interesting that they used a Dutch company to resolve it!

Irony of ironies though, the workman who came to inject the damp-eradicating solution into our walls also managed to drill into one of the central heating pipes at the same time. As a result, when we put the heating on later in the year all the water from the boiler flooded out of the broken pipe and under our kitchen floor, further soaking the walls and requiring another workman to demolish half our kitchen in search of the leak. It was like living through the Flanders and Swann song, The Gas Man Cometh.

And we’re not the only ones to have suffered. In a nearby block of apartments built by the same developer they couldn’t even get the floors level. As a result, everything tips at an angle or slides towards the corners, something not as easily fixed.

Then there are all the horrific tales in the press of people’s houses in other parts of Spain being demolished because they’ve been built without planning permission, or across a right of access.

All this may be stereotyping the Spanish building trade. But stereotypes have to come from somewhere.

And it’s not as if the actual skills of the workmen are any less good than you’d find elsewhere. Many of the ones that have come to our house – and we’ve seen legions – have been knowledgeable and proficient.

This is just a guess, but I put it down instead to time pressures. Basically, during the boom time there was too much money to be made, and buildings needed to go up too fast, for the individual workmen to spend the time needed (and probably they’d like) on doing a bang-up job. The upshot was corners got cut.

So while surveys in Spain may not be the norm, and no doubt the estate agent will tell you it’s not necessary, if you’re going to buy a property here get one done. It will save you a lot of money and a ton of angst further down the road.