Ringing the buzzer to my appartment at 3 in the morning is nothing like jostling a snorer.
She’s seen me, she won’t be smacking me any time soon.Either that or she’s a fan of Black Sabbath because she doesn’t do it anymore.
See, all is good.
I’m not sure if this was directed toward me, but I actually have a sound machine that I sleep to. On top of that, last night, I tuned my TV to a jazz music channel to try to sleep to. Even having the TV at a louder-than-normal volume was not enough to drown out her music.
But what other options did she have to interrupt the snoring?
Noise complaints with neighbors can be bad because in the real world there aren’t many routes to actually getting it handled.
Options:
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Buy ear plugs. I’ve used them years and years ago when I lived in apartment buildings with young people. They were recommended to me by a friend in the Army who used them while working around extremely noisy machinery and they are pretty effective. You can order them off Amazon.com for super cheap, and you only need to use them on nights when something is going on.
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Try to change your neighbor’s behavior. As others have said, some people are polite and if you point out they are being loud they will truly strive to not bother you and keep quiet in the future. But if they aren’t that type of person, this option does nothing at all.
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Call the police. This is super hit or miss. In some places calling the police over a noise complaint might see an officer on the scene sometime in the next 7 days, or maybe never. In some communities police take such things very seriously and will break up parties and et cetera over repeated noise violations. In some college towns if a party gets out of control the police can always threaten to “look around to make sure everyone is 21” or something like that. College students will usually do whatever they are told because they are usually committing many other crimes along with noise violation (drug possession, underage drinking etc.) However, if your neighbor is just a normal person who is being loud and obnoxious but not doing anything else illegal, they may have little fear of the police. They may not care about the citations, either.
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Call landlord /HOA. If you live in a managed community or a rental community, the owner’s association / land lord will sometimes genuinely help you out. Some land lord’s will indeed evict if a tenant is destroying quality of life for other tenants. If it is likely to drive other tenants away then the loud tenant is bad for business. Again, just like the police this is hit or miss, some land lords don’t give a shit and some HOAs are worthless.
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Retaliate. Sometimes it can resolve things, but it can escalate quickly and seriously, and many forms of retaliation are illegal and may carry stiffer penalties than a noise violation.
Your right she had no other option,
She was doing this over the span of two weeks every other night. Fuck’ed up my sleep pattern and made me crazy. When I rebelled, I didn’t play the bass for very long just a couple of minutes.
Top of the morning to ya !
I found a lot of times with noise issues, the neighbors are high as a kite, that is why they don’t realize the music is so loud.
If you have a cure for snoring, please, let the world know. Most snorers would prefer not to snore, and are not doing it deliberately.
The woman in the OP knows that she’s making a lot of noise, enough to disturb her neighbor. She just doesn’t CARE.
First, I can empathize with the OP. I lived with asshole neighbors above me when I was finishing grad school. In fact, I’m sure I posted similar threads to this one when I first joined the Dope.
There is a way to be a nice guy/gal in this. If you’re planning to be out, go to the neighbor and say, “Hey, just so you know, I’m going to be out of town on X dates - so if you want to have a party then, that’s totally fine, you won’t bother me. But on the other dates, I’d prefer not to hear noise past (insert your preferred time).”
You’ve extended an olive branch by providing options for when they can have a balls-out party (assuming, of course, there isn’t another neighbor annoyed by this), and you’ve made it clear when you want the noise to stop. And then just call the police and/or the landlord in the future.
I wish I knew why apartment dwellers think that it’s possible to have a party without disturbing others. If she’s 40 she should have some friends with houses!
I used to live in an apartment building in Portland, Or, where the neighbors were frequently loud with their music after 10 at night.
This isn’t THAT big a deal, but I had to get up at 4 in order to hop busses to get to work on time. In the summertime, with the sun up still AND cranking music, it was pretty difficult to sleep.
I doubt they realized it was THAT bad for me, and I’m not sure it was THAT bad in general, but at least a few times a week I’d go knock and ask them to turn it down.
One night was bad enough, with a party going on, that after two requests to lower the volume didn’t affect the sound level noticeably, I sleep-walked to the basement of the apartment building and threw the fuse switches for my floor.
And went back to bed.
I disagree with this, especially if the neighbors are noisy more than once in a while. If you have those kinds of ear plugs, you will also not hear noises you want to hear, like smoke alarms or the telephone. Ear plugs are OK, but make sure they don’t block out enough noise that they’re unsafe.
This is often the best bet, whether the landlord gives a shit or not, but you have to be prepared to find a new place to live. If the landlord gives a shit, the noisemakers will be gone. If he doesn’t, you probably have recourse to legally break the lease because you don’t have “use and enjoyment” of your home. Same for HOAs. It’ll probably cost you $150-200 for a nasty letter from a lawyer, but they’re more effective than you’d think.
Retaliation is probably the worst way to handle this. It turns an often-mild dispute into a pissing contest, and no one wins that contest. Don’t do it.
Maybe the realization he can’t stop making the noise and is therefore not at fault for its emanation to her ears will block it out, right? Isn’t that how life works?
Ibanez, controlling your noise is your problem. You chose to live around others who presumably can hear you, so it’s up to you to make sure your snoring doesn’t disturb them. There’s a multitude of ways to soundproof your bedroom or at the very least move **your **bed as far away from **her **bed as possible and try to put a barrier between them, as clearly a layer of ceiling isn’t doing it.
If someone had a loud motorcycle they ran every night, should their neighbors ‘just deal’ since the noise isn’t the owner’s fault but the engine’s fault? Or should the owner find a way to quiet the motorcycle?
I know snoring is a health issue that’s difficult to resolve sometimes, but as you’ve already seen it doesn’t only affect you.
Borrow a friend’s baby and take it with you next time you have to ask them to turn the noise down. Try to cry a little bit and wail, “My baby can’t sleep! Why are you trying to hurt my baby?” over and over again until they turn the stereo completely off.
Or just report her to the police, either way.
Do I have a friend who is going to loan me a baby? 
Mine is still being assembled so you can’t borrow it yet, but if it were born and I lived close by I would totally let you borrow it to shame your neighbors into turning down the music. Apparently most babies are awake at that hour demanding access to boobs anyway so I think the kid would be fine with it.
I have the same problem. The assholes next door are CONSTANTLY partying, not just on the weekend, but usually on some weekdays too. They pack 10 or 11 people in a tiny apartment (I saw them all leave once, it was like a fucking clown car), and man, are they loud. I’m reluctant to go ask them to keep it down because if I do call the cops on them, they’ll know it was me, and if you want to retaliate in an apartment complex, it’s easy to do so…throw away your packages, vandalize your car, etc.
What happens if you call the police? Do you have to accompany the officer? Can you anonymously call and leave an apartment number?
I’m so goddamn sick of renting. All those “Rent or buy a house?” calculators should have a “Douchebag Neighbors Three Inches Away” line item.
Where I live, noisy neighbors don’t last long. Prospective tenants are informed from the get-go that the complex isn’t one for partying or loud activities in general. The manager isn’t shy about knocking on doors when she gets noise complaints; if people don’t get the message, she’s perfectly happy to give them a 60-day notice.
The neighbors across the street used to have weekend parties for their underage son, probably around 10th or 11th grade. He ran with a pretty wild bunch and we’d see kids pulling up with beer, mixed drinks, smell grass from the pool in back, etc. This was (previously, at least) a very quiet, up-scale, suburban community. Not only would their slamming car doors and racing up the street at 3 and 4:00 am wake us, but also every dog in the neighborhood. The next morning there would be cans and trash on the street and as I’d mow I’d see terribly hung over teens stumble out to their cars and drive off still intoxicated.
Once or twice we called the police. Then my wife’s brand new car, still with paper tags, had paint remover poured on it and lit on fire. The car did’nt explode but the paint and window seals were shot. Of course we talked to his parents but they weren’t… ummm… impressive.
So I spent $5000 on a home camera security system. Didn’t have any incidents in my yard but when someone shot out the windows on their truck they actually had the gall to call me at 3:00 am on Dec. 26th to ask if they could review my camera footage.
Between them and the bastard next door that hated women and kids, the one that cost me $8000 in court, we eventually moved.
Man, I love my new neighbors now… and for good reason!
Old House;
1> Neighbors two houses down with the yappy dog they would tie up on the porch when they went out of town, sometimes for as long as two days.
Answer: Kept calling the cops, over and over. Nuked the dog one night with a paintball gun (too dark to see it, but I nailed it on the first shot by sound alone) and covered the porch just for good measure. Finally got down to having myself and six neighbors sign a petition to have it removed. It was. The couple divorced and moved out shortly thereafter.
In the middle of all that, they had one of their gangster friends over at 3am on a tuesday or wednesday morning and he left his car parked out front with the windows rolled down and the thumping bass booming. I walked over, reached in the window and turned it down. Guy comes flying out the door screaming at me that I can be shot for that. I thumbed at the car and told him likewise. Ripped him a new one saying some of us have jobs and would like to sleep and no excuse for this shit, don’t do it again. He just stood there and listened, then went back inside. Never happened again.
2> Then the neighbor between us decided his old, dilapidated leaning over garage needed to be very slowly disassembled, and went about doing so over the course of a couple of months. He’d be out there hammering until 1am, despite me coming out there and saying something, then back out there at 5am. Didn’t stop until the thing was taken down. Had a lot of other issues with this guy over the 11 years I lived there. After I moved out but was still trying to sell it, I went over to pick stuff up and found one of his 5 vehicles parked in such a way that I could not use the driveway OR get anything out of my garage. And the asshole wasn’t home. I had it towed.
Sound issues in my previous apartment did not go well from day one. Too long a tale already told here more than once. Mentally ill women on both sides of me who loudly complained about everyone else but were themselves great offenders, and the overly sensitive people beneath me caught in the crossfire.
Had an issue in current apartment with the people kitty-corner from me allowing their 9 or 10 year old daughter to run the halls from about 10:30pm every night until after 1am. EVERY NIGHT. Running up and down the halls, back and forth, screaming and laughing, slamming doors. Literally in and out of the apartment every 90 seconds to 6 minutes. Complained to them, they denied it. Complained to management, they denied it even when their night staff admitted it. Every time I would complain, it would stop for about a month and a half, then start right up again. Called the cops, they grabbed the kids and fled out the back door (the other kid lived near the front door and they’d see the cops driving up). Finally enough other people started complaining about it and they got enough police calls that the complex was forced to refuse to renew their lease. But it took 15 months to get this shit sorted out.
Then the person next to me started playing their tuba at 6:15am one morning. I complained. They got a noise complaint. They retaliated by doing it again. I complained again, AND left a (nice) note on their door asking them to be more considerate. Stopped cold.
LONG AGO… have matured since then, stll it gives me a frisson of prde in my younger self for what amounted to VENGANCE…
Next door neighbours were car buffs, and starting at about 6-7 pm in the evenng they would start tuning their unmufflered cars n the next yard. This would go on (think race car loud engines being gassed and rumbling continuously and LOUD… it shook the plates) untll 11 or 12 at night and later on weekends. Then a loud party, with music , yelling, dogs barking until at least three am.
So, I invted a local punk band to practice in my garage. LOUD. (Nieghbours liked country and western music). One day, I took my violin, hooked an electric pick up to it, and ran t through every effect loop, echo, phlange, phaser, wah wah, reverb, and then set the amps to 11.
I call the resulting composition “Fugue in F.U. for augmented violin and Reving engine”
Asmovian, would you be interested in pricing a hotel get-away for yourself and giving her the opportunity to pay for it? That way she could throw her party with an easy conscious.