problem with the landlord

[Janis Vasiljevs]

I would really appriciate if someone with appropriate knowledge could help me out.

The situation about my apartment in Barcelona, Spain.
In the end of September 2012, we found an apartment on www.loquo.com. We were 3 people who wanted to rent this apartment, but the two other guys were working that morning so they couldn’t show up, so I went alone. I took pictures of the apartment and later showed them to my friends, who said they like it.

When I entered the house I noticed some unusual things. Two of the three bedrooms didn’t have a window. And one of them even had a window to the third room, which is ridiculous. But what the heck, we had a nice living room with a nice balcony with a view on Motjuic. Plus one of us had his own private door to the balcony and the living room also had a huge window/balcony. All three of us are smokers, so a balcony is very important for us to have fresh air and to smoke on the balcony. The landlord didn’t seem suspicious.

We move in the next day, and we sign the contract a week or so after. Everything is fine and everybody is happy, till the fallowing thing happens. At about mid October, workers come to the house and put a scaffolding (frame for construction) in front of our house and the balcony. So now people are walking around our balcony and we can’t open the windows, because there is dust coming in. We obviously were a bit angry about that and we wanted to talk to the landlord again. We didn’t arrange a meeting, but he showed up by himself a couple a days later. He said he is sorry and he told us that this construction will last for 1-2 months. As the rent is 800euro, for two months it would be 1600euro. He gave us a discount for 350euros for the inconveniences that this has caused. We agreed.

Now every month the landlord says that the construction place will be removed in a month. Standard Spanish talk. Now it has been here for 5 months in total. Every month till now we have paid the full amount, except the little 350euro discount he gave us a while back. We have talked with the people who work on the construction site and those people are sure they will need at least 1.5-2 months to finish working. So in total at least 6months.

We are obviously angry and we don’t want to pay the rent, at least not in full. But the landlord wants all the money and he threatens that we are going to lose our deposit and we will have to pay a extra for missing a payment.
We are not sure what to do, we had a talk with him for almost 2 hours. He just doesn’t seem to care about us and he just wants the money.

Has he done his part completely legally?

Are there any suggestions about what to do in this case?