In the first place, the taxes for the purchase of the house are paid at the same moment of the signing of the purchase. So, you must go to an ATM to pay by card or to the CTT to pay in cash.
The taxes were:
- IMT: 3771.94 euros (As we are not married, each one pays the IMT separately, 1885.97 euros each)
- Land Tax: 1480 euros (Each one paid 740 euros)
- Property Registry: 250 euros
- Notary: 450 euros
The house was empty, it only had the kitchen and the water heater. Since Rui Rocha (MaxVillage’s real estate agent) worked at MediaMarkt, on the same September 2 we went with him to order the electrical appliances that were delivered to us the next day.
The same afternoon of September 2, we went to IKEA to buy the most basic things to eat and have a place to sleep. We bought a mattress that we put on the floor so we could sleep in our house from the first night.
It took us about a week to clean and furnish.
The sofa bed that went in the room below was pending for after the bathroom renovations and painting. In the end, we bought it earlier than planned so we’d have a place to sleep while we painted and varnished the bedroom upstairs.
Problems we ran into:
- We didn’t have mailbox key. We had to break the lock.
- One of the windows had a badly placed piece and did not close well.
- There was an electrical problem and 3 ceiling lamps that did not work.
- Although the renovation of the bathroom was something that I already had in mind, when we started to do the work, we were told that the main bathroom already had water leaks that would have given us serious problems in the following months.
- The shower in the second bathroom was also leaking.
- There was some humidity on the walls.
What we did at home:
- Fixed the window that did not close well.
- We cleaned and furnished.
- I put putty all over the house (holes in the stairs, skirting boards, poor finishes on the windows).
- We fixed the garden.
- As the edges of the doors were slightly damp, we placed insulating foam and improved the insulation of the doors with weather stripping.
- We painted the entire house on the inside and paid to have the stair part of the room below painted.
- Bathroom renovation to unite two small bathrooms.
- We fixed what was wrong with the renovation of the first bathroom.
- I placed silicone on the edge of the kitchen and renovated all the joints with bricofix.
- I placed silicone in the shower below and renovated all the joints with bricofix.
- Tiled two walls in the downstairs bathroom.
- I varnished the wooden floor in the main room 2 times. The first time we used an incorrect varnish which was the one recommended to us by the useless Paulo Correia.
- I changed the door of the main bathroom.
- We tuned and painted the two interior doors. They did not close well and after we painted them, they could not be closed directly; so, we paid to have them tuned up and painted right.
- We put a roof on the front door of the house and on the back (+cement floor).
Since at that time I still thought that the agent Rui Rocha was a good person, I asked him to recommend someone to do the renovations.
He gave me the contact of a colleague of his from MediaMarkt named Rui Esteves and he sent me a man named Paulo Correia.
Paulo Correia gave me an estimate of 2,850 euros for the renovation of the main bathroom and to install the tiles in the downstairs bathroom. We had agreed that if he worked well, we would do the rest of the works with him.
The first few days he worked fine.
Initially he had told me that the work would be done in two weeks. A few days after starting, he told us that there were multiple problems in the bathroom, for which he raised the price and extended the time to one more week.
As he showed us, both the shower and the WC already had leaks, and the floors were uneven so everything had to be removed and refilled; In addition, the pipes were placed backwards so it would take more work to place them correctly.
He told me that for those problems he found he would charge me 530 euros more and the work would be extended by one week.
Then he charged 100 euros more for placing the tiles in the shower in a different way. Therefore, in total, the work amounted to 3480 euros.
From there, he began to work slowly and poorly. It was two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon and many days even less than that.
Although at first we found him kind of nice, we later realized that he was a complete charlatan. In addition, every day he criticized something we had done at home and after seeing how he worked, we realized that he would have left it much worse.
He was accumulating all the garbage outside the house, so there came a point when I had to clean everything up.
A month passed and he still hadn’t even finished the first bathroom. The fourth week we already began to remind him daily that it had been a month and still not even the first bathroom was ready.
But that’s not all, the guy had brought a sink in a box that he never bothered to show me. When he put it on, I noticed that it was extremely small and almost the same as the one we had removed. The jerk said he couldn’t return it, so I had to find a normal-size sink and pay for it myself.
When he saw that we were going to pay for the sink without demanding that he pay for it, which was what was appropriate, he began to offer us to cover half that we could deduct from the final payment that included painting the room below.
We told him that we didn’t care about the half he intended to pay and that we no longer wanted him to paint the room downstairs because he had already made us lose a month.
The funniest thing is that then he tried to take the sink that was not installed and that I had paid for. What a hard face!
One Thursday he told me that the bathroom was ready and when I went in to check, I found a lot of things: badly placed shower glass that sounded when moved, badly placed silicone, a broken tile, ugly finishes, putty misplaced, etc.
At this point I was clear that this guy was not going to do anything else in the house and was already looking for other people to continue with the work.
The next day, which was Friday, as soon as he arrived, I showed him all the things that he did wrong and that he had to leave everything fixed that day because we weren’t going to wait any longer. In the afternoon, when he showed us what he supposedly had fixed, we saw that everything was the same.
Diego began to show him everything that was still wrong, and the guy said that he would fix it on Monday. There I became hysterical and left the bathroom. After 5 minutes the guy came out of the bathroom, said that the shower was no longer making noise and left.
Then we realized that he “fixed the problem” by sticking bits of paper between the glass and the stand.
It was the first time he took what was left of his garbage.
According to the budget, I had 850 euros left to pay him. That Friday I decided that I wasn’t even going to let him finish the work because he was going to leave everything wrong.
That same night, the man had the audacity to write to request a transfer of 350 euros. Of course, I didn’t answer him.
Here I pause to tell you about this clown. He told us that he had been married 5 times and had children with each wife; furthermore, the current wife was 20 years younger than him. I also realized at the end of the month that the guy didn’t even know how to use WhatsApp.
Surely, he did not pay a pension to all the children that he had scattered around.
In addition, since he was dedicated to criticizing our house, I asked him to see where he lived. It turns out that he rented an apartment because he had debts, and the banks did not give him a loan. That’s when I understood why the guy was asking for the money to be transferred to the account that was in his wife’s name.
In addition, he told us that his parents had many properties and that he was waiting for them to die to inherit. We understood that not even his parents wanted him.
In the next post I continue to tell you how the story with Paulo Correia ends with the intervention of the police.