Our neighbors are renovating again!
They moved into the house next door (it’s attached to ours) in June and for the first month they did some reno work. We’d suggested that they knock down at least one of their living room walls, like we did, to open up the space.
Believe me it really opens up the space in a small house … our house had an entry way, walls enclosing a tiny living room, a hallway to the stairs that allowed entry to the living room and or the dining room, and there was a wall between the living room and dining room. So that was one small space partitioned with four walls! uh, huh … first thing we did – day one – was to knock down the walls.
Anyway, when they were doing their first renovation they had one wall repaired because one of the pipes within the walls was leaking. Unfortunately the leak wasn’t fixed and now they are having major repairs done. They also seem to be redoing their basement and upstairs bathrooms. The other day we saw a huge box that probably contained a tub and other bathroom items like two stone vessel sinks arrive on a big Home Depot truck.
The sound coming from their house over the last two weeks has been almost unbearable. I think today was the first day that the sounds were tolerable. Last week I think they were using a hammer drill or something to break up concrete in the basement, and I’ve heard them use reciprocal saws (maybe to take down another wall?), hammering, drilling and the contractors have gotten into yelling matches a few times.
All the china and crystal in my china cabinet rattles around when they are working next door too. Plus I think there’s enough vibrations going on that it’s rattled a few doors open. I found our one true closed upstairs with an open door last night and neither Chris nor I have been in that closet for days. Weird.
I just hope they’re almost done – at least with the noisy stuff! I haven’t been sleeping well at night for a few weeks and with the noise all day I can’t even nap if I’m tired. It’s terrible. I’m like a walking zombie!
Have you ever had someone do major renovations in the home next to you? Particularly if you live/lived in a semi-detached? It’s horrible isn’t it?
Yes, we’ve had neighbors running chain saws all day but what REALLY drove me to the point of almost knocking the neighbors door down was the incessant, non-stop barking of the guy’s dog! It was from 7:00 pm until 1:00 am sometimes. NON-STOP! I did not sleep for weeks and finally I flipped out. I then sent notes, nice notes then nasty notes, called him. Finally I called animal control.
I hope your neighbors limit the time of their construction to normal hours and not into the evening. That wouldn’t be right.
Good luck.
Thankfully our neighbors don’t have a dog. We do and luckily she’s not too bothered by the noise .. if we act normal about things she does too. Chainsaws and a constantly barking dog – not pleasant, not at all!
I could live with the hammering and some of the other noises, but the reciprocal saw and hammer drill or whatever they used to break u the concrete is unbearable. There was less noise yesterday than most of the other days though, so maybe they are getting close to finishing. I can only hope!
The neighbors hired contractors so they are only working during the day – 9 to 3 or 5 pm or so. Just long enough to drive me nuts!
Well .. whenever we get back to finishing our renovations (currently sitting in living room with only one of our tin ceiling tiles on it! Argh) they’ll get a taste of what it’s like to literally be on the other side of a house going through renovations. Hopefully we’ll be a bit quieter than their people though.
One funny thing … at least once a day the guys working on their house break out into a loud argument. It’s always at about 12:30 or 1 pm … maybe their hungry and that gets their tempers up?
BTW great video on your site! Good find!
I had the same sort of problem last year, my neighbours were building a conservatory, which would have been noisy enough, but where they wanted it, there used to be a garage which had deep foundations underneath, which, of course they had to drill through.
The whole drill process took 3 days of constant drilling from 9am to 5pm.
Once that was done, they then had to move onto building the actual conservatory! That must have been the longest 2 weeks of my life, plus the loudest.
So far the only thing I’ve had is the tree choppers with the saws, hope it goes quickly for you..
Dorothy from grammology
grammology.com
you’d be surprised how many times I’ve been woken up due to construction it drives me frigging insane because there’s no way to get back to bed.
As a tradesman, I always finish by 6pm and start no earlier than 9am.
I wouldn’t like it if it happened to me, so why inflict a load of noise on others?
There is someone doing renovations down the street right now. They don’t start too early and they’re also quite a few houses away so it’s not bad at all. I couldn’t even imagine staying right next to them.