Guides and information about what it takes to keep a home running in Spain — cleaners, gardeners, pool maintenance, pest control, repairs and the everyday services that come with owning or renting a property here.
When you're thinking about renovating a home in Spain, one of your first questions should be: what am I actually allowed to do without a permit? The answer isn't as simple as "big projects need permits, small ones don't." Spain runs on a three-tier system, the rules vary by municipality, and getting it wrong can mean fines, a stopped project, or a home you can't legally sell until you fix it.
There are roughly 38,000 pools in the Marina Alta area alone (that area includes Jávea, Dénia and the small nearby towns around them). It works out to close to one pool for every five residents. That's a lot of water sitting outside in the sun all summer. It's also a lot of water quietly evaporating every day.
A pool cover is one of the cheapest, most overlooked upgrades you can make. Getting the wrong type of pool cover is a common mistake and one that costs owners far more than the cover itself.
There's a lot more to consider with home security systems in Spain than in the US. Home security systems in Spain are common in new home construction. Expats who buy an existing home usually install a system if it doesn't already have one.
There are many professional firms that you can purchase systems from, but if you're thinking about doing it yourself, it's not as simple as just ordering some cameras or a video doorbell, installing them wherever you want, and forgetting about it. Real planning is required to make sure you don't run afoul of Spain's privacy laws.
Here in Portland the challenge with gardening is too much rain and not enough sun. Gardening in the Costa Blanca flips that completely.
Over 300 sunny days a year, summer highs that sit in the 30s C (80s F) for weeks at a time and barely 500mm (19 in) of rain a year, most of it arriving in short autumn downpours rather than a gentle drizzle.
One of the first things you'll want to do after moving into a home in Spain is make it feel like yours. You start hanging things on walls. Some art. Put up a mirror. Mount a shelf.
Simple enough — you've done it a hundred times in the US. You grab your drill, pick a spot on the wall, press the bit in and... nothing. The drill whines, the bit spins and the wall laughs at you.
Welcome to the land of concrete walls.
We just put in a new page covering a topic that doesn't show up on most "moving to Spain" checklists, but will end up mattering a lot once we're living in Spain: home services. Things we'll need like a house cleaner, gardener, pool maintenance, pest control, handy person and more— the whole list of people we'll eventually need to find and hire to keep our new Spanish home running.
There were several things that surprised us as we did our research.
We now have two house hunting trips to Jávea under our belt— one last August and one in February. It was a great way to see everything in two different seasons.
One of the things we started thinking about when we got home was: what about pests? Is it like Florida where there are mosquitoes and snakes around all the time?
The reality, as it turns out, is there are some of the typical ones that one would expect, along with some that are specific to the Mediterranean climate. Yes, there are snakes. Yes, there are scorpions. And yes, a unique creature — the pine processionary caterpillar — that every pet owner in this part of Spain genuinely needs to know about before their first January here.