June 2026

Search for that answer and you will mostly find furniture package companies advertising a single headline number. Furnish your two-bed from €13,000. From €18,000. From €29,900. What none of them break down is where that number comes from, what is included, what is quietly missing and how much of it is their margin rather than your furniture. This article does the breakdown they will not.

Everything below is based on a real reference property: a typical Costa del Sol two-bedroom apartment with a living and dining room, a kitchen, two bathrooms, a terrace and an entrance hall. Roughly 80 square metres. It is the most common purchase on the coast, and it is the one worth costing out properly.

First, What "Furnishing" Actually Means

There is an important distinction that gets blurred by the package companies, and it matters for your budget.

Furnishing means the furniture and the pieces that make a space function and feel finished: the beds, the sofa, the dining table and chairs, the storage, the rugs, the lighting, the cushions and the decoration that pulls a room together.

It does not mean the household essentials: the pots and pans, the crockery, the bedding, the towels, the vacuum cleaner and the kitchen basics. Those are a separate layer, and they have their own budget. A lot of package pricing blurs the two, either by leaving the essentials out entirely (so you arrive to a beautiful flat with nothing to cook with) or by bundling a token amount and calling the job done. Keep the two separate in your head. This article is about furnishing. The essentials come at the end.

The Real Cost, Broken Down

Furnishing cost lives in a few clear categories. Understanding them is what lets you judge whether a quote is fair or padded. The categories are: the furniture itself, delivery, assembly and a small buffer for the odd jobs that always come up. Here is how each behaves.

The Furniture

This is the bulk of the spend, and it is the number that moves most depending on where you shop. For the same two-bed apartment, the furniture bill can sit anywhere from €8,000 to well over €30,000 depending entirely on the quality tier you choose. More on the three tiers below.

Delivery

Delivery is the cost people forget, and it is rarely a single figure. A furnished home is almost never sourced from one shop. You might have the sofa from one retailer, the beds from another, the dining set from a third, the lighting from a fourth. Each has its own delivery charge, its own lead time and its own delivery window. Budget for delivery as a real line, not an afterthought. On a full two-bed it typically adds up across suppliers rather than arriving as one neat fee.

Assembly

Most furniture at the accessible and mid tiers arrives flat-packed. Someone has to build it. For a full two-bed apartment, with beds, wardrobes, chests of drawers, a dining set, storage and terrace furniture, assembly runs to roughly a full day or two of skilled work. At the going rate of €25 to €35 an hour for a professional flat-pack builder, that is around €500 for a property this size. Higher-end furniture is more often delivered assembled or white-glove installed, which folds the cost into the price rather than removing it.

The Odd Jobs

The last category is the one nobody warns you about: the small handyman jobs that turn a room full of furniture into a finished space. Wall-mounting a television. Hanging mirrors and art. Fitting curtain rails. Putting up floating shelves. Adjusting a light fitting. None of these are big costs individually, but they need a person with the right tools and they add up. Hold a small buffer for them rather than being surprised.

The Three Tiers, Costed for a Two-Bed

Here is what the furniture itself costs across three quality tiers, for the reference two-bed apartment. These are furniture and delivery figures. Your styling, assembly and odd jobs sit on top, and are covered further down.

How Long It Takes

Cost is only half the question. The other half is time, and this is where expectations and reality diverge most.

The furnishing itself is not the slow part. The slow part is delivery. In-stock pieces from the accessible retailers arrive within one to three weeks. But the moment you introduce made-to-order furniture, which includes most customisable sofas and a lot of mid and high-end pieces, lead times stretch to anywhere from six to fourteen weeks. Upholstery is almost always the bottleneck.

Because a furnished home is sourced across multiple suppliers, the real timeline is set by the slowest item, not the fastest. You can have ninety per cent of the flat delivered and assembled within a fortnight and still be waiting a further two months for the sofa. A realistic end-to-end timeline for a fully furnished two-bed, from first decisions to the last cushion in place, is four to twelve weeks depending on how much of the scheme is made to order.

The single most useful thing you can do is order the long-lead items first and build everything else around them. The sofa and the beds are usually the critical path. Everything else can be filled in quickly once they are locked.

How About Those Furniture Packages?

Here is the part the package companies would rather you did not think about too hard.

The furniture package model looks convenient. One company, one price, one delivery, a finished flat. For an overseas buyer who wants no hassle, the appeal is obvious. But convenient and good value are not the same thing, and the package model has three problems baked into it.

The Markup Is Real and Hidden

Furniture retailers and manufacturers offer trade pricing to businesses that buy regularly. A trade account gets the furniture at anywhere from twenty to fifty per cent below the retail price you would pay walking in off the street. This is standard across the industry and there is nothing wrong with it in principle.

What matters is what happens to that discount. When a package company buys a sofa at trade price and sells it to you inside a package priced at retail or above, the gap between what they paid and what you paid is their margin, and you cannot see it. The package is quoted as a single number precisely so that you cannot break it down and work out what you are paying for the furniture versus what you are paying them. You are paying a markup on every single item, and it is invisible by design.

A Look You Have Seen Before

Package companies work from a fixed set of pre-designed schemes. Pick a style, pick a size, and you get the combination they have sold many times before. It is efficient for them and it photographs well in their showroom, but it means your home is a copy of a template. The same sofa, the same coffee table, the same styling, in hundreds of other apartments up and down the coast. There is no personalisation, no response to your taste, no adjustment for how you actually live. You get the look, exactly as everyone else got the look.

You Lose Flexibility

You are buying a package, which means you don't have the flexibility you most likely need. If you are bringing pieces of your own, a sofa you love or your grandmother's chest of drawers, you may end up paying for things you don't need or leave your own pieces behind to keep it simple. And it fails the other way too. A package is built to a standard scheme, so it often leaves out the things your new home actually needs. A proper home office setup rarely features. An extra-large terrace gets a token two-chair set rather than being furnished properly. You end up buying those pieces separately anyway, on top of the package you already paid for.

How The Dream Spaces Work

How we work is genuinely different. We do not sell packages. We furnish your home to your budget, only source pieces that you actually need, understand your styling preferences and we show you exactly where every euro goes.

You never pay more than retail on anything, ever, as we don't do markups. Our styling fee is transparent and you know exactly how much it costs. That is the opposite of the package model, where the markup is baked in and invisible. You are not buying a box of furniture. You are buying a home that is yours, put together by someone working in your interest, with nothing obscured.

Overlooked Essentials

Furnishing gets you the furniture and the finished look, but it does not get you the sleeping, cooking, washing and cleaning essentials. This means a kitchen fully stocked up and ready to use, beds pressed and inviting you for a nap, bathrooms with towels and toiletries within reach and all the cleaning essentials at your fingertips.

This means comfort beyond the complete furniture setup. If you want your home genuinely ready to live in from the first day, you can opt-in for a Move-in Ready add-on. Like the furnishing, there is no markup on a single item. You pay the shop price and receive a full reconciliation with receipts, with anything unspent returned to you.

Need Help?

Furnishing an empty property is one of those jobs that looks simple until you are standing in the middle of it with forty browser tabs open and no idea whether your budget is realistic. It does not have to be that.