I just came back from spending 2 weeknights at my parent’s place. My brother and sister are both home for the holidays, but my parents still work this week.
I now forgive my neighbours most of the noise they make!
My father and sister are both very heavy-footed, and the house is all hardwood or tile flooring. Thump Thump Thump. My sister, being a night owl and generally insane, thinks that getting up at 1am and taking the dogs out for a walk is a good idea. This involves her going up and down the stairs a half dozen times, with a golden retriever and a beagle chasing her, dragging their leashes in their mouths, while she finds socks or a sweater or whatever it is she thinks she needs to go outside. Usually, this process involves some barking from her dog. Once she’s outside, her cat, who seems to believe that he’s also a dog and should spend every second of his life next to the golden, begins a 20 minute power ballad about how much he misses her and the dog and how he should be allowed to go outside too. When they all come back in, it’s doggy claw scrabbling as she thumps around giving them treats and fresh water. She then cooks herself supper. By the time she’s in bed, say 2:30 or so, my brother usually comes up and uses the washroom, which involves a door slamming (why?!?) and then my father gets up at 5 am because he’s insane too. Thump Thump Thump down the stairs and hey, look, time to empty the dishwasher! Clang, rattle, clang! Then my mom gets up at 6:15, time to shower!
Anyways, suffice it to say that if you can manage more than 2 hours of sleep without being woken up, it’s a bloody miracle. I don’t know how I survived the first 19 years of my life in that house… no wonder I’m an insomniac!
So, my neighbours are mostly forgiven. At least they keep most of their thumping around to regular daytime hours!
I live in a dorm at a college where a little more than a third of the students are in the conservatory of music. As freshmen, they all take many of the same required classes, and I’m pretty sure that all of my music-major friends had a lot of rhythm assignments in their sight-reading classes.
Because of this, I’m pretty sure that the guy who lives above me is doing homework when he starts drumming in fast, obnoxious polyrhythms on the furniture, walls, floor, and probably ceiling, too, at odd hours of the night. Sheesh.
We had this conversation once in my family, when my parents rented an apartment directly below Dropsy and the McDroppovitch family. “How often in the course of a day,” my father asked, “do you drop something? Because the McDroppovitches do so every three minutes.”
“They aren’t dropping things,” my brother said. “Some people just do . . . things . . . loud.”
He gave us a demonstration, kicking his chair away from the dinner table, slamming his fork into his plate and grabbing both with one motion, and then holding them an inch above the sink and letting them fall into the stainless steel with a crash. Three drops in ten seconds, and from below, they probably sounded like shot put practice.
I think he was right. Some people just do things loud.
Yeah, upstairs loud neighbors can be all kinds of hell.
When I was in college, we had a unique case…a visitor to our place seized a walking staff and pounded the ceiling to complain about the noise. Yes, not a person who paid rent, but someone dropping by to say hi. Yes, the soft, sound-absorbing panel ceiling. Punched a big damned hole right through our ceiling panel. Didn’t apologize at all, either.
I knew friends who had Random Vacuumer living overhead. All hours of the evening, at least, when I was visiting, even past midnight, the vacuum cleaner would roar to life – often only for a second or two. Then ten minutes later, VOOM for another 30 seconds. Thane an hour later, one second, followed two minytes later by 20 minutes of vacuuming. The actual noise bothered us less than wondering what the hell was going through their minds.
We used to have a clumsy child living upstairs. I mean, pathologically so. Every night he’d be running across the bare wood floor… stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp…and then he’d we’ll, run right smack into something and fall down stunned…THUMP KABOOM (dishes rattle) (silence) “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!”
Over and over this kid would make shatteringly loud impact noises that shook the condo. At first the noise annoyed us. Then his physical health worried us…dear God, that one sounded fatal, and we’d listen with bated breath for the crying to start. Finally his mental health became an obsession. Doesn’t he have any learning capacity? What’s wrong with this kid?
He was still alive when he moved out; that’s all I know.
Loose change from their pants pockets is my guess. My SO does this. Like many of us, his routine when he gets home from work is to take off his pants. Somehow, his pockets turn out and his coins spill all over the floor. I am constantly picking dimes and pennies up off our wood floor.
I’ve requested that if he must drop money, it should be twenty-dollar bills, but so far, he hasn’t come through.
They are called Spaniards. You have no idea of the amount of noise in Madrid. It is maddening and unbearable. Go to any public place and people are all talking at the top of their lungs. I was once in a coffee place filled with old ladies and I could not stand it. I remarked to the person I was with that I did not understand how they could be shouting like that and he said “probably because they are all deaf”. Maybe, but they were wearing me down and I had to leave. Even if you are in an empty coffeeshop the noise is unbearable. Someone is re-arranging tables, chairs, plates, whatever and the noise is unbearable. Things which I manage to do without any noise and cannot understand how they can possibly be so noisy. I. cannot. stand. it.
I live in a condo and had to send this letter to the association. I meant the neighbors and they appear to be normal But here is what I wrote:
This is a complaint against Unit 2R:
Byron removed the carpet from his unit 2R bedrooms and living room and replaced it with hardwood floors.
The sound is too loud it goes through ear plugs.
His new tenants drop items on the floor at all hours of night 3:35am and as early as 6:55am. The two little kids are 3 and 4 year olds run through the unit with hard shoes on the hard wood floor.
Unfortunatly I have asked about the throwing of hard items on the Bedroom floors to no avail.
There is no silence through out the unit and if I had a tenant finally to reside in my unit 1R then there would be no Peace for anyone below those hard wood floors.
Carpets will deaden a lot of sounds. If zombies are dropping things on the floor above you then the simple solution is to cover your ceiling with carpeting.
Heh, a zombie from when installing hardwood floors was de rigueur. No sound absorbing carpet. And echoes. All normal sounds are emphasized. That is all.
Apparently this problem has been around since the early 1900’s:
Ultimate trivia: Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse lived underneath the Dingbat Family.
“I swear, it sounds like they’re always throwing bricks at each other!”
My upstairs neighbors in a Haight-Ashbury Victorian apparently vacuumed every evening till midnight, then invited elephants to bowl till 3 AM. My 250 watt amp barely compensated. My downstairs neighbor in a Fillmore flophouse near People’s Temple bothered everyone by playing Malcolm X speeches at 110 decibels with his door open. I managed to deflect the machete he swung after I pulled his room fuses.
I used to hear sounds like that from the upstairs apartment here in Panama. The mysterious thing was that it would always start about 10 PM. Ping ping ping ping ping across the floor one way, then ping ping ping across the floor the other way, for about a half hour, and then would stop. It wasn’t loud and didn’t bother me that much, but it drove me crazy since I couldn’t figure out what it was.
It turned out that the five girls who had moved into the apartment upstairs were strippers who worked at the night club a few blocks away. They would get ready to go to work about 10 PM and put on their high heels. The sound was them tap-tap-tapping across the tile floors as they got ready to go out.
I know this is a zombie, but I can relate. I used to live in an apartment with the world’s noisiest upstairs neighbors. They clomped around in work boots at 2am, and just generally made a huge amount of noise at odd hours.
One day the landlord asked if we knew where the upstairs tenants had gone. Come to think of it, there had been some particularly loud moving-type noises recently, and then nothing since. Turns out they skipped out on their rent and disappeared. I felt bad for the landlord, but very happy to have quiet restored.
I remember a cartoon by Guindon where the guy was tossing cinderblocks at a target on the floor. The caption: “The reason for those mysterious noises coming from the apartment upstairs.” Tried finding it but no luck.
