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Building A House In Spain

Proyecto Básico - presented

Jan

22

10.00 at the Ayuntamiento to present the Project. I thought this would be a long morning but Jose arrived with 2 spiral-wrapped documents and 2 forms (already filled in), all I had to do was to sign the forms. He handed in everything and we went for coffee. Job done in all of 5 minutes. Now it's a waiting game until we get the licence, Jose mentioned a week but that's probabñy a Spanish week! (like a Cornish Mile) He will email me when it's ready then we can visit the notary to add the building to the land's escritura.

Posted By Graham read more

Proyecto Básico - the Plans (Part 4)

Jan

21

At last we have the final drawings for the house. I can also throw some light on why, in the second set of plans, the architect (Jose) had shrunk the front of the house when adding covered terracing at the end of the house. On the type of land we have (rural) there is a floor size limit for a house of 5% of the land area which based on 10.000m2 is 200m2 (maybe we could argue that we have nearly 13.000m2 giving 260m2 but as we already had problems with this I suppose we'll let it go).

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Proyecto Básico - the Plans (Part 3)

Jan

20

Apologies, I've been a little lax in adding entries, so what's happened since the last entry - well, quite a lot

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Proyecto Básico - the Plans (Part 2)

Dec

20

Well, the new plans match our design pretty closely - the only real differences being an extended top floor and changes to the main entrance. Then I spotted that an important detail had been omitted .. we wanted a covered terrace at both ends of the house and along the front .. no end terraces. back to the drawing board (pun intended).

Next set of plans, the terraces are now present but instead of extending from the end walls they 've pushed in the endwalls (so the overall width of the house is the same) .. no good as this considerably reduces the size of kitchen and lounge.

Posted By Graham read more

Proyecto Básico - the Plans (Part 1)

Nov

20

We'd put a great deal of thought (and argument) into our house design and had sent this to Jose who responded with an initial 'idea' for the house that unfortunately was nearly but not quite totally unlike what we'd asked for! He is now redoing the plan in accordance with our design. Jose wanted lounge and bedrooms at the front, kitchen and study at the rear - our house will have fantastic views but we saw no need to give a bedroom that view, we wanted bedrooms at the back, kitchen and study at front. My workshop has also disappeared from the plan.

Posted By Graham read more

The contract

Nov

15

We bit the bullet - we've told Jose to go ahead with the project and this means signing a contract with him. The contract is very simple and states:

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First steps

Oct

25

Well, so far we have bought the land and found a local Spanish architect (Jose) - one thing of real note here, our architect is local so he speaks the local language (Valenciana) which is a real boon when dealing with officialdom!

Now that we own the land we want to proceed with our project so we asked our architect to check once more the local requirements and any possible problems, what he came back with was:

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The Land

Oct

14

If you want to build a house then you need some land .. pretty obvious really! When you are looking for land here are our "Golden Rules":

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The Dream

Oct

14

It's most peoples dream as envisaged by oh, so many, TV programmes - a house of our own in the Sun; sitting on the terrace with a glass in one hand while admiring the view. There are basically two ways to achieve this, namely, either buying an existing property or building your own house and it is this latter which will be covered here.

Posted By Graham read more