Houses and Villas in Spain Part 1 - Rustic Houses

A new house under construction, but they are not all built like this!

This is the first of my articles on how Spanish property is, or can be, built. Our Spanish country house started life as an agricultural building

This has been a crafty way of building a home in the orange groves for a long time. The previous and original owner added, poco a poco, until he ended up with a three storey house that had two beds on the first, a very large kitchen, lounge and dining room on the ground and three massive rooms in the underbuild. Having a lot of sense, this Spaniard, constructed the house very well, with only a small proportion of the walls being in single leaf, which were duly improved by yours truly. The end result was a solid, well built house, being perched on excellent foundations. This is not always the case with rustic houses, however.

I’ll Show You Mine…

A “simlar” project across the valley, was purchased by an English couple, who thought that they had a bargain. After talking to them at the builder’s merchants, (where I used spend long expensive hours,) lead my building friend and I to “have a look” at this edifice, with a view to helping them put it right. The house had always looked really impressive from a distance and we had a friend who had looked at it previously. He had said that it needed too much work, but we didn’t really believe him.

All that Glitters

A relatively superficial survey revealed that half of the house had no foundations at all and most of the ground floor was laid on soil. The archways which looked wonderful from 100 metres each had settlement cracks, which gave away the former and the “septic tank” or porous pit as it turned out to be, abutted one end of the building. All the windows were aluminium, but the sort that they put in sheds here. The wood burner didn’t work due to a faulty flue and the internal layout was awful, with lots of added on rooms and a “summer kitchen” only (outside!) It did have a sort of swimming pool, which was a water resevoir for the fruit trees. It was above ground and not very pretty.

Cash Crop

This house was sold for about €250,000 about 5 years ago and had 6,000 metres square of nispero trees. These trees were going to subsidise the price of the house at harvest time, but nisperos are not easy to maintain and cultivate. In addition they all fruit in a very short time and go off even quicker. The result that the cost of growing them about equalled the crop value in a good year.

Remedial Works

The earth and rocks had to be dug out around the walls “sans foundations” and new foundations laid This is when the septic tank was discovered. A new tank was necessary. The ground floor had to be laid in concrete, a kitchen and bedroom constructed and the flue reconstructed. At the end of the process, sporting its substandard windows and single leaf walls, it remained a sows ear.

Heating Not Necessary

According to the owner, who was a heating engineer, he did not need heating and would not listen to us neighbours, who knew well that he did. Not wishing to smug or vindictive, we did derive some pleasure from his follies, as he turned out to be the biggest “know it all” we had ever encountered.

Is It Legal?

We never did bother to ask him if the house was legal. We made ours legal and extended it a bit more, by using an architect who was willing to certify the age of the construction. He stretched the truth a little for us on the new construction, which we had just added and we got away with it. This loophole has now been closed and in some areas was never allowed.

You Need 10,000 sq metres!

If your land is this big, you can build a house, subject to planning and building regs of course. If it isn’t you can’t. BEWARE estate agents who inflate plot sizes when selling land or this type of rustic dwelling! If you are looking at a country house on less land, which is not urbanized, or even if they have the requisite sized plot, you need to see the escritura and have it examined. Unless the house has been constructed recently and even if it has, I would always recommend a detailed survey for obvious reasons, even before a deposit is laid.

Mike Pick, Homesearch Costa Blanca

Tags: building defects, rustic houses, spanish property, villas