Piso Perfect (and more!)

Having just done some serious apartment, or "piso," hunting, you'll notice this is what's been on our minds :)

1) The days are long, but the pillows are longer

Everyone knows that Spaniards like to stay out late. A meal can last over three hours, and a night out might go until 4:30AM. But it might surprise our readers - it certainly surprised us! - that the pillows are just as long. We recently moved into a long-term apartment, and our landlord provided new pillows for the guest bed. Or I should say, he provided one new pillow, that runs across the entire double-sized bed. An interesting choice! At first we suspected that maybe it was a particular quirk of his, but during a stay in an AirBnB in Granada we found that each and every bed (four in total) came complete with a lengthy head cushion that ran from one side to the other. We're currently using the long pillow as a cushion on our sofa. IKEA is also loaded with "long format" pillows here.  

This all makes buying pillow cases tricky because you really have to pay attention to the particular dimensions of YOUR pillow.  At this point, we've really messed up and we now own pillows of 3 different dimensions, and we can't just throw any pillowcase onto any pillow.  

2) Painted Walls

When we visited Spain this past summer, we arrived to find our AirBnB hosts had recently repainted the apartment. They presented this to us with much fanfare, but it was actually mostly an inconvenience. The apartment smelled for several days, and the walls shed paint dust if we leaned on them. We checked the reviews from past guests and found another one that mentioned freshly painted walls- from only 12 months ago!

We chalked it up to a particular quirk (what a quirky people!) of the host, and didn't think much of it until we began looking for a long-term apartment in Madrid. Our Spanish tutor dedicated an entire class to reviewing the language and norms of a typical rental contract with us. In passing, she mentioned that, if we move out after only a year, it's our responsibility to repaint the walls. But, if it's been two years or more, the landlord should handle it since at that point paint deterioration is considered normal wear and tear. Of course, she added, you can hire someone to paint, or you can do it yourself. The idea of moving into an apartment that hadn't been freshly repainted was out of the question. Uh... Ok, we thought.

We found an apartment we liked, but it was in an older building. We called our local friend to get a gut check on the choice. Our friend ran down the list of ways landlords tend to take advantage: make sure they fix any appliances; we shouldn't pay for building-wide central heating; and make sure they repaint the walls before we move in!

At this point we began to realize how serious Spaniards are about freshly painted walls. Shhhhhh.... we don't actually care if the walls are freshly painted. But we began to doubt. If our new landlord didn't paint the walls, would that be some kind of slap in the face?

Thankfully, on the day we signed the lease, our landlord proudly stated that he had hired people to come paint it before we moved in.

3) Nómina Please!

Landlords and real estate agencies are hyper focused on using your "nómina," or employment direct deposit payments, to prove you are a reliable tenant with the means to pay for your rental. Think of this as their version of a credit score in the US. Unfortunately, only domestic nóminas from Spanish jobs count.  Since all of our nóminas come from the US, about two thirds of apartment listings weren't even willing to consider us as tenants.  Of the ones that were willing to consider us, several brazen real estate agencies requested a year of rent paid upfront PLUS a non-payment insurance... why both!?  It's a seller's market here right now, and some customers are willing to cough it up.  We were able to skirt around the whole issue by eventually finding a private landlord who didn't mind that our paystubs come from abroad.

4) Quick turnaround times

Idealista, Spain's version of Craigslist for housing, does not have a filter for move-in date.  And, the vast majority of listing are ready for move-in NOW.  What about the fact that most landlords require 30-60 days notice for terminating leases?  Well, it seems that you have to give notice without nailing down your next home or be willing to pay for lots of overlap.  We still need to do some digging around to get to the root of why it's hard to plan ahead here when you want to move.

5) Foam mattresses

In addition to long pillows and spotless white walls, another hallmark of a Spanish home, as far as we can tell, is plush foam mattresses... that's right, no springs!  Karen particularly dislikes these because they almost all universally bow towards the middle.  So, if two people are on one foam mattress, there's quite an incline (we've measured up to 5° on our phones) and you end up rolling into each other.  Fortunately, we've upgraded our new apartment so it boasts not 1, but 2 mattresses with good old fashioned springs.  Sorry, foam mattress-lovers.

Unwrapping our new spring mattress

6) Question: Explain the difference between these three items: Persianas vs Estor vs Toldo

The vertical strap on the right opens and closes the exterior blinds.

Answer: "Persianas" are metal rolling shutters found on the exterior side of a window, an "estor" is a fabric roller blind, like a curtain, and a "toldo" is an outdoor awning, often with a fabric covering that can be mechanically extended and retracted.

Question: Why are you writing about all these random words?

Answer: Spaniards are very preoccupied with managing (and hiding from) the sun, especially in the searing hot summers.  As such, we hear talk of these items A LOT.  Our current apartment has persianas, which serve not only as very effective blackout curtains, but also help with sound isolation and temperature insulation.  While some persianas are automated with a remote control, ours are manually raised and lowered by pulling on a strap that runs vertically along the window.  It's a bit heavy and hard to use since our windows are so big and the persianas are made of metal.

We, and some other expats we've met here, have also noticed that in general we find indoor spaces to be relatively dark here.  Our Spanish language tutor, who is Spanish, explained that locals prefer it that way because of this conception around hiding from the sun in your home.  We bought an extra lamp with several bulbs to light up our living room to a more "American" taste level.

7) Central Heating

You can dial the heat up and down using the knob, but the heat is only available from 2PM until 10PM.

We found our apartment building particularly desirable because it has central heating, which is not something you can take for granted here!  Since it's impossible to divvy up heating consumption by unit, the heating bill is paid by the landlord association, and it's illegal for them to pass that category of expense onto tenants.  So, heating is included in our rent which is great in Winter when it hovers around freezing overnight.  

When we visited a few apartments with central heating, we found them unusually warm.  Too warm, in fact.  Not to worry though, you can always adjust the temperature of your own individual apartment.  Central heating here generally comes in the form of a boiler/radiator system that pumps hot water through pipes that reach radiators (big metal grates with lots of surface area) located in each of your rooms.  To lower the temperature in your room, you can turn a knob to reduce the rate of water flow through a particular radiator.  We haven't come across these systems much before, so pardon us if we just over-explained :)

It turns out there was a very good reason as to why most apartments we visited were quite warm.  We visited them in the evening, and we've learned that it's common for a building to only run the central heating system from around 2pm-10pm.  The reasoning goes that you don't need heat overnight when you're under the covers, and most people are our of the house in the morning until siesta at 2pm, so this seems to be the best schedule to save on the heating bill.  As a result, we too now keep our heat on full blast from 2-10pm to "load up" for the ensuing evening and morning.  Using this approach, our apartment can get as warm as 75F at night and doesn't drop much below 66F in the mornings.  This system does deter us from opening windows and airing things out much in the morning because we can't heat it back up quickly.

8) The Walls are Thin

Almost everyone we know of complains about noise from their neighbors in apartment buildings. Unfortunately, it seems buildings here are old and sound isolation between units is widely lacking.  We've met several Chileans here, and two of them work in restoration.  They shared this particularly enlightening insight: Both Chile and California lie on fault lines and are earthquake prone.  Earthquake resistant buildings must be able to absorb lots of energy, which has has an added benefit of creating great sound insulation.  We haven't spent a lot of time living in apartment buildings outside of California and Chile, so maybe we've been spoiled all along with very quiet constructions.  Karen is starting to think she might be a "top floor" kind of person.  Our solution in the meantime: earplugs and white noise machines.

That's it for apartments... as promised, here's the "and more" (aka two other random tidbits):

9) They're Not Trying to Upsell You On Health Stuff

Karen woke up with a slightly irritated eye one day and stopped by a pharmacy to see if they had anything that might be of help.  They sent her away, saying she should try giving it a day or two with some warm, salt water soaks.  What!?  You don't want to sell anything!? Crazy.  (It turns out they were right, and Karen got fine on her own within a couple days.)

10) +2 hours

As a rule of thumb, we add 2 hours from the current time to get a sense of what we should be doing at a particular time of day.  Bedtime was 10:30pm in the US?, Now it's 12:30am.  Want to watch a matinee at the move theater? The earliest showing is not at 10am, but at noon.  Lunch used to be at noon?  Let's make that 2pm.  Want to go shopping at a market before 10am?  Good luck.  Although some open closer to 9am, when Matt went to the Mercado de la Cebada at that time, most vendors hadn't showed up yet and many were still setting up.

One perk of this is that technically, there is a 9 hour difference between Spain and California, but it often only feels like a 7 hour difference.  Coordinating phone calls isn't quite as difficult as it would appear on paper.