The people below me are so loud that I can feel the noise vibrations from having their TV so freaking loud. Sometimes if it’s getting ridiculous, I’ll stomp on the floor and surprisingly they often turn it down when I do. Their bedroom is right under mine and sometimes he snores so loud that it wakes me up. I know he can’t help that one but it doesn’t stop me from being woken up.
I don’t want to complain to the apartment manager because I have 4 budgies and sometimes they can really raise a ruckus and I don’t know if anyone else can hear them but I’m leery of complaining when I might be someone who could have complaints against, if that makes sense. I also don’t want to go and ask them to keep it down. I live in a very bad, high-crime area and I’m a female living alone; I don’t want any problems with other tenants.
So that leaves me with learning how to not let it get to me so much. It’s one of those things that could be in the “Little things that greatly bother you” thread because it greatly bothers me!! Any tips on how to let it go and not bother me so much?
There’s not much you can do for their daytime noise, unless you want to document each instance and complain to the manager each instance, etc., but that’s a real pain in the ass and would undoubtedly build up a lot of ill will on their parts, complicating matters even further. But for sleeping, I have found the ultimate solution to apartment noise, I shit you not. A box fan. Run a box fan close to your bed, and it will drown out all noise hither and yon, I promise. A small table fan is not loud enough- trust me on this. It will take you a few nights to get used to the box fan, but you will, and then from then on, sleeping will be pure quiet bliss. I don’t even recognize it as a fan noise anymore- I now hear my box fan as a gentle low wind noise. It’s the only way I’ve been able to tolerate apartment living, and I wish I’d thought of it years ago when I lived in another apartment.
A white noise machine! I know ALL about loud apartment neighbors, and my white noise machine is a lifesaver. Mine plays sounds like a waterfall, forest, etc., but I just use the plain whooshing sound.
I’ve got a great noise generating iPhone app (SleepStream 2) and if I am concentrating I’ll put on earbuds, blast that, and put some silicon earplug stuff around the earbuds. It’s actually pretty soothing.
I was recently reading the book Happiness: The Science behind Your Smile by Daniel Nettle, and one of the interesting things he noted is that while humans are generally extremely adaptable, and in fact we tend to underestimate our ability to adapt to negative circumstances, chronic environmental noise is one on a very short list of things that humans never really adapt to. It’s been scientifically proven and everything.
I thought about that, but thought it seemed weird to play it in the day for some reason. Do you use it during the day? Now that I think about it, it seems totally weird to think I wouldn’t use it in the day :smack:.
I’ve even been looking at them online. I think that might be the answer. There’s all sorts of them on Amazon.
Yeah, I leave my white noise machine on 24/7. Just in my room though. The noise doesn’t bother me much in the living room, or I’d get one for there too.
I got a fancy Brookstone one several years ago and it works great but then I got my daughter a cheap Conair alarm clock one and it works just as well for our purposes.
Duh; go buy a house. There’s never been a better time to buy. (Just joking; I recently bought a house, and have a group of feral parrots who include my avocado tree in their daily cycle of terror. My neighbors swear I’ll eventually stop noticing them; either that, or I’ll be considering second amendment remedies.)
But on a serious note: go meet your neighbors. They’re unknown and possibly big jerks until you meet them; after that, they’re just people you know. I’ve lived in apartment buildings with Harley owners, a guy who would rev his Dodge Charger engine over and over while leaving it running for hours, and a downstairs neighbor who had an unusually strong addiction to Guitar Hero. Once I started talking with them (about all sorts of things, including their noisiness), they were people I knew – the Harley guy was that funny redneck named Jim, the Dodge Charger guy was an interesting Hot Wheels designer and the Guitar Hero guy continued to be an annoying guy who played too many videogames (but he did dial the bass down a bit). But I no longer seemed to be bothered by Harley engines and old Dodge Chargers.
The worst neighbor, if memory serves, was me – I would occasionally hear my next door neighbor coughing or snoring or whispering to his GF while I was in my bathroom failing to keep down the noise while taking dumps. Job one on my checklist after moving into my house was to take a loud, gleeful, fart-ful dump. While singing.
If you can hear your neighbors doing relatively quiet things (in the scheme of things) like snoring or watching TV, the problem isn’t the neighbors - its the apartment. Walls/Floors are too thin and are just built wrong to block sound. You shouldn’t be putting in noise complaints for anything but exceptional noise - loud parties, jackhammering, tv/stereo loud enough that it is clearly audible from 50-100ft away outside of the apartments entirely, not just in your apartment.
I bought a condo a few months ago. It was a great deal and I am happy with it overall. However, I absolutely cannot figure out what my upstairs neighbors are doing at all hours but especially at about 3 am. You can’t hear voices or musical sounds because the building is well protected against that. However, it sounds like they are either doing heavy construction or hosting a Richard Simmons Dancing to the Oldies weight loss dance class every single night. It shakes the whole room with booms and bangs.
I am very noise tolerant in short stretches but I cannot figure out how they manage to generate so much for so long. We are talking about sustained, intense activity for anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours a night. How much energy and focus does someone has to have to keep that up? One night, I woke up to the sound of large furniture being moved above me. That’s fine. I have rearranged a room on a whim in the middle of the night as well but their bedroom should be the same as mine and there simply can’t be that much to move so far for so long.
I still haven’t met these people but I am a little afraid to from what I hear. My biggest fear is that I will go up to their condo and find out that it has been vacant for years.
I used a box fan for years until it crapped out. Then I got to thinking I was kinda tired of the breeze it created, even when faced away from me, and it took up an outlet and floor space. I already had a CD player in the bedroom, so just burned a white noise MP3 onto CD, set it to repeat, and sleep like a baby. But yeah, even still living at my parent’s house more than 20 years ago, I always had a fan or something going to block out random noises while sleeping.
The daytime stuff, though, there isn’t much you can do about that. Especially if neighbors are just making regular daytime activity noise. For me, leaf blowers make me sooooo stabby, but I just have to shut the windows and deal until they’re done. “Angry people” noise is hard to tolerate - couples fighting and yelling - but luckily I’ve only had one couple to deal with who were like that, and between several months of police calls by me and other neighbors, and me making sure management knew about the police calls, their lease was not renewed.
My “white noise” during the day is music or TV always on. I never have just silence when I’m home, it feels weird, plus it makes me focus unnecessarily on noise from outside my apartment.
For a more drastic approach, call 311 and ask what the threshold is for noise to be to be considered a valid noise complaint to the police (in my former neighborhood, it was if the music was so loud it could be heard clearly outside), then call the police when it happens. I don’t think the police tell them who issued the noise complaint, though you might want to check on this.
I feel ya. My upstairs neighbors have what I call “rocking chair parties” nearly every weekend. Basically the sound of several rocking chairs on a hardwood floor, for hours. What the fuck are they doing? We close on our house on the 18th, thank god. Between that and the guy who refuses to acknowledge that there are assigned parking spaces I am really hating on my building.
What kind of flooring do you have? If you have hard flooring (tile/wood) than an area rug might help reduce the noice the seeps through the floor. It could be enough to deaden it from “I’m grinding my teeth so I don’t scream” to “Hmm, he’s snoring again” level. Basically, you’d be insulating the top side of your floor.
Well if you don’t want to complain to the manager or speak with them directly I’m not sure what other options you have aside from moving. However, I can tell you what I did very recently about my very amorous and loud new neighbors. After bitching about it via FB to all of my friends and trying to decide how to approach a woman 20 years older than me (she’s 68!!)about her loud sex sessions with her SO, I did call the manager…but, not to submit a “formal complaint” necessarily. Just to let them know that I could hear my neighbors moans and groans, climaxing over and over again starting at 5:30 a.m. – This was on her first week after she moved in. I was so sleep deprived I was ready to snap. After talking with the manager I decided to write her a letter and hand deliver it. I knocked and said, “This is for you,” then headed back downstairs. 20 minutes later she was at my door with her hand over her eyes repeating over and over again, “I am so embarrassed!” Come to find out this woman had not had sex in 10 years and believe me she was making up for it! We talked and laughed and she promised to keep it down and try not to do anything before 8a.m. Since then I have heard her a few times, not early in the morning and definitely her lovemaking does not have as much …vigor, shall we say. Our apartment complex was built in the 70’s and quite cheaply I might add. My last neighbor had major allergies and sometimes I could hear him sneeze very loudly and repeatedly. It sucks living in apartments built such as these. I am hoping to move soon. I had not lived in an apartment since 1986. If she goes back to making that much noise that early in the morning, I will file an official complaint and she will get a warning from management to keep it down, then 2 more and she is evicted.
My suggestion, do something…within your comfort levels, of course.
Headphone headphones headphones. In my waking hours if I’m not at work I’m usually on the interwebs and listening to CDs (Yeah, I’m the person who still buys them.) The guy next door owns two CDs: “The Best of Earth Wind and Fire” (I know because I own this myself, but don’t want to listen to it 6 hours a day!) and whatever the Usher CD is with “Yeah” on it.
That having been said, I’ve burned through 3…possibly four sets of headphones in the year or so I’ve been here, leading me to order a $150 pair of DJ headphones and KEEPING THE RECEIPT. Of course this doesn’t protect you from people like my upstairs neighbor whom I’ve named “Walkasaurus.” We’re living in approximately 800’ square apartments and yet, not only does she find some reason to traverse it back and forth a hundred thousand times a day (dropping cinder blocks in her path), she vacuums minimum once a week, (usually three times) one time for TWO AND A HALF HOURS! I’m not even kidding. I feared she would actually suck my apartment up into hers.
This is what you get for $875/month in California!
I was going to suggest just this, as a more compact alternative to the box fan (and probably more energy efficient).
If you ever get to chatting with the neighbors and feel friendly enough, you could mention the snoring in the context of, say, “my mom lived with Dad’s snoring for years then he was diagnosed with apnea and got a CPAP and feels great now and so does mom” (or whatever would fit the situation.
Noise-isolating headphones might be useful also, if you’re watching TV or listening to music - you’ll hear your stuff and not theirs. Of course if they crank something so loud that bass vibrations are loosening your fillings that won’t be enough, but I don’t get the impression that’s the issue.
