A friend of mine lives in a multi-unit apt in Montreal with thin walls, floors, ceilings… and is kept up until 1am pretty much every night by neighbors watching tv and talking loudly. It’s bad now, it will be worse when summer rolls around and the windows are open, of course.
Any suggestions on what she can do to remedy the situation? Anonymous note under the door? Note to everyone in front of the elevator?..anything? She’s not the type to knock on the door and ask, even though that’s probably the best thing.
I’ve left notes in a neighbor’s mailbox. It sometimes works for a couple of days.
He has some answering service so his phone doesn’t ring. Next time I’m going to call folks in the area with the same last name and see if they are related; then I can call them when he plays music late at night. Perhaps family can make him shut up.
I guess it depends on what you consider to be “loud”. My take on apartment life: Unless you have a suite in Trump Towers, there is going to be a degree of “normal life sound” that is going to seep into your space. That’s just the reality of it.
You can’t expect people to keep your hours, refrain from laughing, talking, having sex, arguing, listening to music, or walking around. If you have flimsy walls, you’re just going to have to deal with it or look for another place.
Now if these neighors are partying like rock stars, that’s a different matter. Call the cops and let them deal with it. Call the building manager and let him deal with it.
How do you get them to quiet down? You don’t. Trust me. All you do is make them resent you, which makes them louder. It will also make you an enemy of the management, which will happily slam the door behind you when you move out, and find an excuse to keep your whole security deposit.
Complain to the apartment manager, or make a police report if it gets too loud.
Personally, I wouldn’t ever go knock on their door or do anything to let them know I’m the one who complained. After all, they know where I live and where I park my car.
Discuss it with all neighbours. if the walls are as thin as you say, they are bound to be troubled by their neighbours as well. Bundle complaints, read up on ways to soundproof the building, and bring a joint proposlat to the landlord.
Or buy a box of earplugs.
If you want to be unfriendly, tell the neighbours, in a “I’m sorry to break this embarrassing news to you”-sort of tone, that you can follw all their conversations word for word. That will leave them with the choice of keeping it down or loosing their privacy.
It would be important to make sure that “your” loud isn’t everybody else’s normal sound, before you complain to everyone. If you have to, just calmly complain to management. It usually works better if you go with some other tennant at the same time. I wouldn’t call the cops on the guy unless he was beating his wife or something because odds are the cop is going to make it obvious who called the police about noise disturbance…
Now, see, I’m a big picture kind of guy. I was just going to say “Kill 'em” and let The Big Cheese work out the details. But AFG made it in here first and laid out a whole simple, yet elegant, plan. I gotta get better at details.
Apartment noise is a fact life. People live their lives in their apartments, and they can’t spend all their time tiptoeing around. Some people are louder than others, but for those of us that are sometimes a little louder, we appreicate the leeway of being able to make a little noise now and then. If it is every apartment making noise- not just one problem neighbor, or if it is stuff like overhead walking, I’m afraid there is not much to be done.
There is a chance she’'ll eventually adapt to it. I used to live in an apartment mere feet away from a major street. I spent the first few months with earplugs and complaining. The then got used to it and learned to appreciate the sounds of the traffic and people on the street. If you spend all your time angry and stewing about it, you are going to notice it and it’s gonna bug you every night. If you accept it, there is a chance you’ll stop noticing.
Other solutions are earplugs, a pillow over the ear, moving her bed away from a shared wall or windows (this can make a huge difference) or learning to sleep with some white noise on- a fan or something.
Beyond that, the only thing do is have a non-confrontation and honest talk with her neighbors. An anonymous note is just being passive agressive, as is complaining to the managment. If you want to get your way, sometimes that means putting yourself in an ackward situation. She should say something like:
My experience is that it is easy to get used to a noise that is a relatively constant background noise (like traffic). You can learn to live with a noise that you know will end at a certain time (such as noise from a business next door that closes at 11 ppm). But when you have a random unpredictable distinct noise (such as people talking loudly) which could end at 10 or go on til 2 am, you have the makings of madness.
I have experienced this many times. I have done quiet polite chatting, loud angry confrontation, and getting other neighbors involved. Nothing has been a permanent cure. All of my occasions were in quiet residential neighborhoods where the noise travelled from house to house, so I never had the option of talking to landlord, but unless the noise is so bad that the landlord can evict I doubt it’ll help.
It’s either move or use the Goddess’s snakey magic.
