A refurbishment usually goes wrong before the first wall comes down. Not on site — in the fortnight nobody plans. The licence that was never applied for. The neighbours nobody warned. The furniture still against the walls the morning six people turn up with a pneumatic drill.
Half of what you do to prepare your home for a refurbishment is the same anywhere: clear the rooms, protect what stays, agree who does what. The other half is specifically Spanish, and it is where owners from abroad tend to get caught out — the town hall paperwork, the tax that comes attached to it, and the neighbours downstairs.
The protocol also changes with the type of property and the type of work. It is not the same job in a flat in a block of flats as in a detached house, and repainting a bedroom is not the same as moving a load-bearing wall. So settle the scope first, then plan the preparation around it.
Here is how it goes, in the order things actually happen.
First, the town hall paperwork
In Spain building work is authorised by your local ayuntamiento (town hall), not by a national body, so the rules, the timings and the fees change from Málaga to Torremolinos to Benalmádena. Broadly, there are two routes:
- Minor works (obra menor, often filed as a declaración responsable): a new kitchen or bathroom, flooring, non-structural partitions, repainting. You file a self-certified notice with a costed budget and can normally start within days.
- Major works (obra mayor): anything that touches the structure, changes the facade or the external joinery, or alters the layout enough to change how the property is used. This needs a technical project signed by an architect, and the licence takes weeks rather than days.
Two questions decide which one you are in. Does it touch the structure? Does it change what the building looks like from the street? If the answer to either is yes, assume major works and put the extra time into your programme now, not in the week the tiler is already booked.
You will need the works budget either way, because the tax is worked out from it. Most municipalities charge the ICIO (Impuesto sobre Construcciones, Instalaciones y Obras) as a percentage of that budget. The legal ceiling is 4%, and plenty of town halls apply it in full. On top of that comes a licence fee of roughly 2%. Both vary from one town hall to the next, so treat the total as an order of magnitude: allow something in the region of 5–6% of the build cost before a single tile is lifted.
And do not start before the licence is in hand. This is where owners get caught out: the town hall can suspend the works and fine you, and the fine is rarely the expensive part. The stopped site is, with a contractor’s team standing idle and your start date gone.
Before you read on about how to prepare your home for a refurbishment, these three articles may also be useful:
Outside the front door: facade, windows and the street
Anything that changes what the building looks like from the pavement stops being your decision alone. Windows and external doors are the usual sticking point: new frames, shutters, glazing a terrace, an air-conditioning unit on an external wall. Nearly always a licence matter, and usually a community matter as well.
Then there is the street itself. Scaffolding, a skip or a lorry standing on the pavement needs a separate permit to occupy public land (ocupación de vía pública), charged by the day and by the area you take up. Settle in writing who applies for it and who pays it. It is a small line item that produces a surprising number of arguments.
If you are only refurbishing part of the house, write down which rooms are in and which are out before the price is fixed. Scope that grows room by room is the most common reason a refurbishment ends up well above the quote, and at the time it rarely looks like anyone’s fault.
Tell the community, and tell them early
If you own a flat, you belong to a comunidad de propietarios. It is not a freeholder and not a managing agent. It is the association of every owner in the building, chaired by an unpaid president who is one of your neighbours. The paperwork is usually handled by a professional administrator (administrador de fincas).
Blocks of flats in Spain are governed by the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal, the Horizontal Property Act. Its Article 7.1 lets you alter the inside of your own flat. The conditions: you must not affect the structure, the safety or the exterior appearance of the building, nor the rights of another owner. And you must notify whoever represents the community beforehand. Notice, not permission. Write to the president and keep the copy.
Permission is a different matter, and you do need it when the work touches common elements: the facade, load-bearing walls, the roof, terrace waterproofing, the risers and shared services. That goes to a general meeting and a vote, which takes time. If the vote goes against you, you come back to the next meeting with a modified proposal, and the calendar moves again.
Even when you need nothing from your neighbours, tell them anyway. A refurbishment means noise, dust and a lift full of rubble, however small it is. Two days of work and nobody minds. Two months and you will want the goodwill. Check the community statutes and the municipal ordinance for permitted working hours, and check whether your building bans works in July and August, as many buildings on the coast do.
Preparing your home for a refurbishment: before the builders arrive
With the paperwork sorted, the practical part begins. Depending on the scale of the work, whole rooms have to come out. Empty what you can. Where you cannot, pull the furniture away from the walls and group it in the middle of the room, which is enough if the job is painting and not enough for much else. If it is not enough, the furniture moves to another room.
Small pieces are easy. Heavy pieces are not, and this is worth raising with the contractor before the first day rather than on it: ask whether the team can help shift them, and whether that is included in the price. Once moved, cover everything with plastic sheeting or old dust sheets. Building dust travels a great deal further than people expect, and it is abrasive.
Rooms that are not being touched get sealed. Close the door, tape around the frame, and do the same with the grilles of any air-conditioning or heating units in the house. A dust-filled indoor unit is one of the more irritating bills to arrive after a refurbishment, precisely because it was avoidable.
Door frames, doors and external joinery that stay in place also need protecting. In principle that is the contractor’s job rather than yours. Which brings me to the honest point: if a quote leaves out protection, daily clearing up and taking the rubble away, it is not a cheaper quote. It is an incomplete one. Ask for those three lines in writing before you sign anything.
None of this is difficult. It is a list, and the whole value of writing it down is that nothing on it has to be remembered on the morning the work starts.
At Klic Arquitectos we work from Torremolinos, and refurbishments are the largest single part of what we do: flats and houses in Málaga and along the coast, alongside our retail architecture work. If you are weighing up a refurbishment and you are not sure which licence applies or what it will cost to obtain, it is worth asking before you commit to a builder or a start date. That conversation is short, and it tends to save months.
