(We have an apartment!)
It's been a full couple of weeks getting settled here, but the upshot is...we have an apartment! Apartment-hunting in Madrid is roughly similar to apartment-hunting in the States: You go to Idealista.com (the Spanish version of Apartments.com, although you can also look for houses for sale there), search for the amenities/price/neighborhood you want, and go from there.
...and then if you're clueless expats like us with only rudimentary Spanish skills, you retain the services of someone local to help walk you through the rest of the process and ask questions like “are these walls drywall or lath-and-plaster?” Our guardian angel for the apartment search (and the rest of the bureaucratic processes we've been working on) has been Aurora (https://aurorainmadrid.com/), and without her....well, let's just say I'd have much less time to write cheery blog posts.
While finding an apartment we liked was not really a problem,
getting it involved a few more wrinkles. Spanish law is
extremely favorable to tenants. Even if a tenant does not pay rent, eviction is extremely difficult, so landlords are understandably picky about tenants. And they're a little fixated on the idea of a monthly paycheck (
nomina). Our visa includes an official sign-off from the Spanish immigration officials that that we have enough money saved to fund our retirement and aren't going to be deadbeats leeching off the Spanish social safety net. You'd think "if the [Spanish] government trusts me, maybe you could,"
1 but apparently the official
gobierno imprimatur isn't enough for landlords; if you don't have a
nomina they'll either reject you out of hand or require significant additional financial documenation and guarantees.
2 But luckily we were able to reassure the owners that we weren’t penniless okupas
3 masquerading as middle-aged early retirees, and Aurora even negotiated them down €100 on the rent!
And so here we are! Our neighborhood is great; we're smack in between Atocha train station and the Reina Sofia Museum, a short walk from the Retiro and the museums along Paseo del Prado. Here is the view from our window:
For a Spanish apartment, it's pretty spacious -- about 1000 square feet, three bedrooms, two baths, and a long (if narrow) balcony. Here's the living room:
Yes, the girder in the middle is a little odd, but we thought it was part of the charm. What we really like is all of the light that comes in from the windows. We inherited the folding chairs from the landlord -- they came in surprisingly handy while we were waiting for IKEA to deliver our furniture.
Yes, IKEA. Specifically, the MANDAL bed with headboard, the ÅBYGDA mattress, the NORDBERGET pillow topper, and the NATTJASMIN sheets.
4 Think back: There was a time in your college days when you bought a bunch of IKEA furniture. You put it together -- maybe competently, maybe less so. You fought with the cheap metal screw-in cams and wooden pegs. You moved it: To grad school, to the apartment that came with your first job, between various crappy and less-crappy apartments after that. With every move it fell apart a little more. You added a screw to shore up the fiberboard, some duct tape in the back where it wouldn't show. Eventually it fell apart, but at that point in your life you were a success; you gave the old bookshelf to Goodwill, bought yourself some real furniture and told yourself your IKEA days were over.
...or at least that's what Amy and I thought. Since shipping our furniture from the U.S. to Spain would be be prohibitively expensive, we had to get rid of it all and start over. And when you're retired, living off your savings/investments/pension, and need to furnish a new apartment, where do you go?
That's right: IKEA. Just when we thought we'd seen the last of grubbing about on our hands and knees hammering in dowels and trying to decipher cryptic diagrams with no words. It feels a little like we failed Adulting 101 and have been sent back to take the Immediately-Post-College remedial course again.
Because one of the things that Spanish apartments typically fall short on is closet space, the second bedroom has become a his-and-hers closet, thanks to some PAX wardrobes that took forever to put together. These were remarkably fiddly (particularly the drawers) and are not attached to the walls in any manner whatsoever. Thank goodness Madrid isn't prone to earthquakes.
The living room, with yet more IKEA (the rug), and a couch + coffee table that are from Maisons du Monde, a store that is slightly more upscale than IKEA, but when you come right down to it still sells bolt-it-together-yourself furniture. Our cephalopod friend in the rear is Diego.
This bit was pretty cool: As part of our cable/internet package we got a free TV. So we said, "That's good. One less thing."5
The dining room table; I'll bet you can't guess where this came from. We've been trying to eat more at the dining room table rather than in front of the TV because, well, if you buy a dining room table you should really use it, although it's been seeing just as much use as a furniture-putting-together station.
And that's it! We've landed and built ourselves a nest. Now if we can just get our paperwork finished we'll truly be settled in...
1Top Gun (Paramount Pictures 1986) (http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/t/top-gun-script-transcript-cruise.html).↩︎
2I find this particular cross-cultural difference a little short-sighted. I mean, just because someone gets a set amount of money every month it doesn't make them any more likely to give that money to you. I would think that (ex: ) some impoverished writer living paycheck-to-paycheck with no money in the bank is less likely to pay the landlord than a pair of moderately well-off expat retirees who (i) have enough money in the bank to cover their expenses for a year and (ii) had to prove that to the Spanish government before entering the country.↩︎
3Okupas are people who take advantage of Spain’s tenant-friendly laws to squat in apartments without paying. It’s an absolute nightmare (https://realting.com/news/how-squatters-occupy-houses-in-spain-the-real-story) so I can see why landlords in Spain are so concerned.
.↩︎
4BTW, I looked these names up on Google Translate; they mean nothing in Swedish, as I've always suspected.↩︎
5Forrest Gump (Paramount Pictures 1994) (https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/forrest_gump.html) .↩︎
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