Idle Thoughts

The custom in Spain seems to be that when you buy a house, it is sold with some basic furniture included. You may be able to negotiate with the vendor to buy some other pieces that they were intending to take away. This is something you will arrange among yourselves - the solicitor doesn’t seem to get involved in this process, unlike in the UK where a big deal is made over exactly what gets taken and what is left behind. When I went back to the house I eventually bought, the lady of the house took me round each room and explained to me (in spanish) what would go and what would stay.

My experience of this is that the furniture the vendors “gave” me was the stuff they simply didn’t want - or couldn’t be bothered to take away. This included old chipboard wardrobes with broken hinges, a large number of tubular steel-framed chairs, some rather tired chairs and a sofa and a several bedframes. As mentioned in other articles, the bathroom suite needed replacing and there was a rather old fridge in the kitchen. Thankfully, the vendors did take their freezer full of meat.

One thing I have noticed and that seems to be bourne out by others is that (in my area, in particular) the local people are considerably shorter than northern europeans and the size of their furniture tends to reflect this. Beds are shorter than I was used to and the kitchen units I inherited are significantly lower than the modern standard sizes. The biggest issue however is that door jambs are a lot lower, which always causes me a sore head and has laid others out cold.

Where to get furniture in Spain

On the basis that sooner or later you will decide to get rid of all or most of the furniture you were left, the next question is “what to replace it with?”. One of the drawbacks of rural Spain, that I’ll address in more detail later, is the lack of big shops - due to the smaller number of potential customers. This leaves you with two alternatives: buy locally or go to a city. The small exposure I have to local Muebles (furniture) shops is that they tend to go for “chunky”, one-off type pieces with little choice of colours, styles or finishes. Unless you have pieces made specifically for you, they will tend to be made for spainish-sized people. The stuff also seems to me, at least, to be very expensive - as you would expect for hand-made furniture. If, lyou are used to buying furniture from specialised stores, your choices seem to come down to El Corte Ingles: the best description I can think of is like John Lewis, some large one-off warehouse style outlets, or IKEA. Be aware that these places only inhabit the more populated areas, so you will have to travel and also have to work out how to get your stuff home - or have it delivered. My house is at least 100km from any of these places and therefore well outside their delivery zones.

This lack of delivery options (plus the inherent “Yes sir, 2-4 weeks. No we can’t be more specific”) meant I felt I was pretty much on my own so far as getting furniture was concerned.

I’m a buyer, not an orderer.
OK, this is a bit of a rant, but it is something I’ve learned about myself over the years. My idea of buying an item is to go into a shop, select the product I want, pay for it and take it away. Now I appreciate that this only works for small items, such as Mars bars and for larger pieces - say a double bed, I do need to get it delivered. However, unless I can get a precise date for the delivery I am quite prepared to walk out, and will probably end up paying more at another place for the certainty of knowing when my stuff will arrive. It’s a continual mystery to me why no major furniture retailer has discovered that there is a large proportion of the population who can only accept deliveries in the evening or at weekends. The supermarkets have no trouble delivering at convenient times, why do other retailers have such a blind-spot when it comes to letting you have the stuff you’ve already paid for?
Ahhh, I feel better now.

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OK, back to the question of furnishing the place. For the above reasons and personality defects I came to the conclusion that I was going to have to get the furniture myself. Since I wasn’t in a position to wait an indeterminant time (as my visits to Spain were quite limited) I needed stuff I could see/buy/take all at once. That left no alternatives to IKEA. There was a new store recently opened in Murcia, so I arranged for my next trip, in May 2006, to fly into Alicante, courtesy of EasyJet. From there I hired a van from the Hertz office (€90 per day - I only stayed a few days!) and stopped off at IKEA on the way from the airport to the house.Until that time, my only experience of going to IKEA was the large store in Park Royal (N. London) where I had bought a few small things. One thing I was not ready for was the difference between what was in the catalog and what was available in the store. I had innocently assumed that if it was in the book, it would be available to take home. OK there are a few exceptions, such as bespoke kitchens (more of this later) but otherwise I expected to fulfill my shopping list. Boy, did I get a surprise.Up until then I had been sleeping on an inflatable bed I got from Carrefour in Granada on my very first trip. So the top priority was a me-sized bed. This was followed closely by some armchairs, to replace the spanish legacy - which I’m sure had fleas. When I got to the store I had a good idea of what I wanted and was pleased to see that the showroom was displaying all the bits I intended to come away with. Better still, they all looked much as I expected them to, so there was no reason for last-minute changes of plan - or so I thought. Armed with my list of IKEA part numbers I headed off to the warehouse part of the store to pick up my selections, only to find some of my carefully chosen items simply weren’t there. More annoying still was that some pieces that came in multiple boxes had one box present but no stock of the second. Hmmm, time for a rethink.

All in all, on that visit to Spain I made two trips to IKEA and spent about €1600. Apart from the beds, chairs and a sofa, I also got a kitchen table + chairs, some chests of drawers and a decent wardrobe. Apart from the 5 hour round trip to the store, the rest of the visit was spent with an electric screwdriver, glue and the instructions for all the flat-packs.

The end result was that the house was livable, albeit with some crucial items (such as a TV and washing machine) missing. I’d fix that on a later trip and find a better way to furnish the house that was a lot cheaper.