You people have it easy.
Let me tell you about two years ago.
Two years ago, in an incident that made the papers, a chunk of concrete fell from the balcony of one of the buildings owned by the property management company that also owns my building. The chunk hit a woman on the ground. Said woman, upon being discharged from the hospital, sued the crap out of the property management company. In addition to the payout to the woman, they set upon revamping all of their buildings to bring them back up to code and shore up their balconies in particular – especuially in those buildings, like mine, where the balcony juts out partway from the building. (About 6 inches in my case, but whatever)
This project started in the late spring of 2004. It consisted of affixing powered scaffolding to the front and back of each building, tearing out every single balcony, trimming the concrete down a few inches, then putting in new railings and glass. In use for this project were such wonderful power tools as hammer drills, rotary hammers, concrete saws, angle grinders (with cutoff wheels), power sprayers, and good old-fashioned hand tools like the sledge and the claw hammer.
Now, I don’t know how much you know about the accoustics of an apartment building composed of thick concrete walls and ceilings (which is great for soundproofing absent a really boomy stereo system or people dropping marbles on their linoleum upstairs) but when power tools are applied to the structure, regardless of where in that structure you are relative to said tool, you can hear it do its business. Not like you can when you’re outside near that tool, but like you can when you’re on the other side of that concrete wall the hammer drill is pounding into. Sound travels through concrete in a similar manner to the way it travels through water; the structure just picks up the sounds made anywhere in the building and transmits it to everywhere else in the building.
Now, imagine being in this building with three or four people simultaneously working on it with hammer drills and rotary hammers.
Imagine this going on every day except sunday and days when weather did not permit (i.e. rain or on cold winter days).
For 10 hours a day.
Starting at 7:00am.
For the next fucking year and a half.
Imagine how loud it gets when it’s in the vicinity of your own unit. Imagine that going on all fucking day for weeks on end because they’re working on one floor at a time and each floor days them at least a week to do.
Imagine them coming back to your floor for this process on different occasions four times – once to strip the old balcony away, once to chip away the excess concrete, once to set new concrete, and the last time to add the new railing and glass.
It was, in many respects, much like trying to sleep on a construction site.
Feh. One measly alarm clock at 8am. I’ve lived through the Viet Nam of homestead disturbances.