Hi there,
Initially I had an apartment in Valencia and Diego had his in Almussafes. My apartment was in the Campanar area, and the location was ideal; In addition, it was an indoor apartment so there was practically no noise.
I bought the apartment without having to ask for a mortgage, so I had no debt. I could live peacefully and save for trips with my salary of a thousand and something euros a month. In fact, the vast majority of Spaniards would have been happy with that.
Then I started having problems with the neighbors. In that building, 95% of the tenants were women between 70 and 80 years old who had been there since it was built. These ladies managed and decided everything that was done, and there were measures as absurd as all the lights in the building being on all night because they were afraid.
I realized that the building manager was also the same age and a close friend of these ladies. One afternoon I went to talk to him, and I realized that he was not normal and that in the building they were going to continue doing what those ladies wanted until they died. In addition, there was a dark management of the money of the building and the administrator refused to show me the invoices or the previous minutes of the community.
So, I put my apartment up for sale and in the meantime, I rented it out on Airbnb. It was not something that caused me sadness or anything because by that time I had already verified that Spain was a country in which I was not going to live for much longer.
It took me two years to make the sale, and everything turned out great because I made money with the vacation rentals and with the sale. In addition, the apartment was bought by some parents for their son, and they behaved in a classy way. As they did not need a mortgage, we did all the paperwork super quickly and we did not have any problem adjusting the respective accounts for community, electricity, water, etc. I was very lucky to meet them, and I always remember them with affection and even admiration.
Diego’s building was quite new and when I moved in with him, there were still several apartments for sale.
Initially only the neighbors on the right side bothered. A couple had bought the apartment, but there were always different people. The worst thing was that on weekends during the summer a small group of teenagers would get in and spend several hours with the trap at full volume and smoking drugs on the balcony.
Even so, it was something sporadic that did not bother too much.
Then the upstairs neighbors had a child, and the nightmare began. The baby cried 24×7 and I’m not exaggerating. So, we spent more than a year without being able to sleep well. We hoped that at some point when “Baby Satan” (that’s what we started calling him) grew up, he would stop crying all the time, but he didn’t.
Additionally, Baby Satan’s parents instead of walking normally, spent all day running around the house, so it was like having elephants jumping. In those fleeting moments when the baby wasn’t crying, they would drag furniture and drill.
With the quarantine came the worst…
In addition to the noise that we already put up with, the lady downstairs who was half deaf spent the whole day talking loudly with the neighbor across the street and of course, the neighbor across the street also shouted. This lady also has a nickname, but I can’t tell you.
Our neighbor on the left, nicknamed “Drugs”, started working remotely and people came to his house to buy drugs. So, for each client they spent half an hour talking loudly and laughing out loud, with the respective doors slamming in and out.
On one side we had the thugs with the trap, below the screaming deaf grandmother, above Baby Satan and on the left, the one who sold drugs.
Here I decided to put the apartment up for sale and Diego still wasn’t very convinced; also, that he did not want to lose money with the sale.
When the quarantine was over, we thought the noise levels would drop a bit, but things got worse.
The apartment on the right was sold. A family moved in that was much worse than the thugs who would eventually smoke drugs and listen to trap.
Our room was attached to their kitchen and the woman spent from midnight to 2 or 3 in the morning cooking, closing drawers, putting on the blender and so on. I couldn’t understand how someone could spend up to 4 hours opening and closing drawers. In addition, at various hours of the day and night she would start yelling at the children and at her mother and many times they would also cry out loud.
We nicknamed this woman “Little drawer” because of her love for opening and closing drawers. In fact, I dedicated many songs to her (adapted to her lifestyle).
We called her attention, but there was no improvement, so we had to take the mattress to the living room to be able to sleep.
That’s not all, 5 people lived in that apartment who spent the whole day going in and out, so imagine the amount of slamming doors.
On the corner of the street where the building was, there was a set of vending machines. When the quarantine was removed, all the teenage thugs from Almussafes would gather on that corner, buying things from the vending machines and staying all night on that street drinking, with the trap at full volume, laughing out loud and even moaning.
There was also a time when, for almost a month, they left a poor dog on the roof of one of the houses and it spent the whole day and night barking. Although people complained, no one called the police.
As soon as it was possible to travel in the summer of 2020, we began to move wherever we could, so we spent very little time in Diego’s apartment. But the little time we spent; it was a complete nightmare. The last time was the summer of 2021 and to everything I told you before, another dog was added to the general noise, and he barked for hours.
Diego, who normally has much more tolerance than me, was disgusted by the neighbors, the building and Spain. He was desperate to sell the apartment and catch the first plane out of the country. In fact, he was already considering losing money and getting the apartment out of his way as soon as possible.
Another thing is that the building was new, and it felt like we were in the Bronx. The walls were more stained and broken every day, the floor was dirty with garbage, in the garage people left garbage and debris for months. The last time we were there, they passed a communication because there were people who went into the garage to drink and left everything full of bottles.
In July 2021 when we had just arrived from Portugal, we showed the apartment to a couple and that same night they asked us for a discount because they wanted to buy. We gave them a small discount and we waited for them to process the mortgage with the bank.
July, August, September passed and at the end of October we assumed that the sale was not going to take place because it seemed impossible to us that a bank was taking so long to give a mortgage. We bought the flight to Mexico for the beginning of November.
We were leaving on a Tuesday and just the Thursday before the buyers showed up to tell us that their mortgage had been “approved”.
These guys started to ask for a lot of papers and without knowing them, logically we were not going to give nothing. We went to the bank where they were applying for the mortgage, and they explained to us that the process had changed and that now the bank reviewed the papers before giving the final approval.
In 5 days, we had to do all the paperwork with the bank, deposit contract, move all the things in the garage of Diego’s parents, talk to the notary and leave all the papers to Diego’s parents and the instructions for the sale. Pure stress.
Several months ago I had already put away everything that was not staying in the apartment in boxes, but we took the opportunity to leave everything in the garage and thus not have to bother anyone at the moment of the sale. We had also made a power of attorney to Diego’s parents in case the sale took place when we were not in Spain.
To all this, we must add the loss of time having to explain things to the buyers that they already had to know. They were the dumbest thing you can imagine; thank goodness that to grant a mortgage they do not measure the intellectual coefficient.
They had no idea about the laws, or the procedures, or anything. They were also unable to search things on the internet. In fact, a few days after signing the sale, they write to us because they called to change the water bill and they had been told that Diego had to do it, and they even gave us their bank details.
I responded by explaining that it was evident that the person who attended did not want to work (typical in Spain), that we obviously could not and were not going to call and that they should not pass on their data to strangers. Really, how come you can send us your bank details via WhatsApp?
These are the kind of people that one doesn’t understand how they survive in the world.
Even so, thanks to them we got rid of that apartment nightmare. Days after we had sold, another communication arrived saying that on the third floor someone had opened the fire extinguishers and had filled everything with foam. When we saw the photos, there was Baby Satan’s father because apparently, the worst had been in front of his door. You don’t know how we laughed and were glad we made the sale.
This is how this story finished with a happy ending for us and with the learning that if in the future we buy a property in which we are going to live and make our base, it has to be isolated and without neighbours.