Banks and Couches

After the purchase the contracts arrive. Bulgarian contracts seem to be somewhat brief, not anywhere near the same level of detail you would expect from a British property purchase. There were a couple of pages of reasonably translated Bulgarian, with clauses that seemed to be quite weak and, in some cases, looked unenforceable. The only real concern I had was that the contract had changed in it's content for some key areas from the one I'd seen in Bulgaria. There was a 10% penalty to the builder if the St Vlas build overran, which seemed to have been removed in the final draft. I'd been in St Vlas in January anyway, and had seen the progress for myself, so didn't have too much concern in this regard.
I started looking at furnishing at this point. Although Barrasford and Bird offered a complete deal, which involved a local company (local in Bulgaria, obviously!) who would do everything from the kitchen to the last teaspoon. I'd wanted to shop around a bit though, so I looked at various companies in Varna, Bourgas, Sunny Beach and St Vlas but, short of going out to Bulgaria for a couple of weeks, it proved difficult to source the right material for a beach apartment rental at a better cost. I ended up getting package from Barrasford and Bird, which was fine quality for a breach holiday rental, and upgraded to things like washing machine and coffee maker just to give a more luxurious rental to stand out from the normal package holiday. I'll find out over the next year or two's rentals whether it was worthwhile or not.
While doing this, I had to figure out how the payments were actually made. I appears that this particular builder, while Bulgarian, required payments in Euros. This makes it a little easier to organise since there are a number of companies that deal with this. I used a company called MoneyCorp, who seemed to be just the same as any other number of companies, so I won't recommend them or not. The only strange thing was that the ask questions about the money such as "What is the money for?". I, of course, answer "To buy property in Bulgaria". They then ask 'Where did the money come from?". I, of course, answer "The bank". I assume this is to meet money laundering regulations in the UK, but it did seem like a pointless exercise to me.
So, that was Bulgarian currency sorted out, transferring money to Bulgaria, buying furniture in Bulgaria, all without having to actually travelling to Bulgaria.
I suppose it was only when Barrasford and Bird told me that the furnishing company were going to let them down it became an issue...