I’ve been so frustrated with my neighbors lately that I’m seriously thinking of putting my house up for sale. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you probably know that my house is a semi-detached .. meaning our house is attached to another one and because of that … well .. we can hear our neighbors.
By hear our neighbors I mean, we can hear just about everything … I can hear them walking around in their shoes and talking, I can hear their toddler running around the house playing with her toys, laughing, making sounds, thumping things and screaming and crying and so on.
I try my best to ignore it … but sometimes you just can’t. I mean … before this couple bought the house next door we used to have a family living next to use that loved to Karaoke all the time! Look through some of my old post from 2006 … I have some funny yet frustrated ones about my “Karaoke neighbors” LOL.
I think my neighbors toddler is the biggest problem. She’s about three years old and she still sleeps in her parents bedroom and she wakes up crying just about every night at about 4 am! They just let her scream and sometimes she screams and cries for half an hour. Now we don’t have any kids … in fact it’s looking like I can’t have kids … so it’s kind of unbearable to have to hear someone else’s baby cry every single night and I’ve been hearing this since they brought her home from the hospital. What am I supposed to do … wear my skullcandy earbuds all the time?
The very worst part is that I think the toddler has hit the “terrible” stage! About five weeks ago I started to hear the occasional door slam. Doors would slam in the house next door about three times a day – at different times of day. I could tell it was the little girl doing it … sometimes a door would slam several times in a row, other times just once. I hated it immediately, but I hoped that her parents would take care of it and that within a week or two it would settle down.
After three weeks of constant daily door slams … some happening very early in the morning .. ie 6 or 7 am and some late at night – ie Midnight I was getting pretty fed up. It didn’t seem like our neighbors were doing anything about getting their daughter to stop the door slamming. I’d also noticed that some of the door slams were happening at regular time periods like just after 1 pm in and at about 6:30 pm in the evening … hmmmm maybe that’s when the little girl is very tired or hungry? You’d think that after close to a month her parents would have figured out that there was a pattern to their kids behavior and also figured out a way to stop it … geez … we’d figured out one EASY solution, simply go out and by a bunch of door stoppers and place them in most of the doors then their daughter wouldn’t be able to slam the doors and she’d forget about doing it quickly enough.
About two weeks ago my husband was eating breakfast in a restaurant with his parents and our neighbors were behind them and Chris said something about the door slamming. It seemed like our neighbors had no idea that we could hear the door slamming. Huh … geez … our whole house shakes! Actually our house or ok my couch shakes when the toddler runs around their living room!
Anyway .. after Chris told them we could hear the door slamming it slowed down a bit. It’s still happening, but it’s happening less than it was. We did get mad at them on Good Friday though .. we were trying to sleep in since my husband had the day off work and their little girl must have jumped out of bed and slammed either their bedroom or closest door – at 8:00 in the morning! On a holiday! GRRRRRRR! So my husband, who never sleeps in and who never gets mad, jumped out of bed and started slamming our bedroom door and a couple of dresser drawers before getting back in bed. I guess he wanted to let them know what it sounds like from the other side. It got really quiet on their side after that. Of course their back to making lots of noise again.
Do you have noisy neighbors? How do you deal with it? I know my neighbors are just living their lives .. we’ve asked them many times before if they can hear us and they’ve always said no. I don’t know if they are deaf or if our walls are weird and we get all the sound piped into our home .. we even sound proofed the adjoining wall on the main floor when we had karaoke neighbors and it helped a bit … but not enough. Any ideas?
I hope you had a noise free Easter holiday! I don’t have kids and maybe this is why I’m not too tolerant when it comes to kids and noise. Luckily I work most of the time and I don’t get to be at home that much to hear my neighbors.
Wow Sad Story mate!i has problems too but i always call the police!
Yikes! That’s a tough one… I’ll bet there’s not much the police can do, although I’d bet if it was a dog barking incessantly there would be more of a chance… strange but true!
Every idea I come up with has some major drawbacks (earplugs all the time, even to bed? uck), so I would definitely start looking at other options. If they plan to stay a long time, and they’re not teaching their kid to behave properly, then there’s not much you can do, likely for many years. Good luck!
sometimes there is not much you can do but move
The problem with nosy neighbors is that they don’t go away and are a huge inconvenience. I have been in your shoes before, and it is the worst!
Tricia instead of selling your house or moving away why don’t you consider talking to them about your problem. If they are some considerate they may change their habits. Or you can even drop a note or write a letter to them explaining everything. Hope this will save you from lot of troubles. Good luck
This is one of the really galling things about home ownership: you buy a house as an investment but no one warns you what the neighbours will be like and either they swear and row or they play their music too loud! It all boils down to the need to consider other people! But how many people do? And now you have the hassle of putting your house ion the market without giving away the real reason for sale!
Here creating lots of noise is not an immediate offence in the United Kingdom, although depending on certain factors, it can become that way. When you are under stress from noisy neighbours, it may seem desirable to get the authorities involved – but before doing so, it is worth considering a less drastic course of action to try to preserve relations with your neighbours. There are things that can be done to try to get the calm you should have in your home before escalating the situation to involve the authorities.
Hrm, I’d advise against calling the cops, and I wouldn’t go the note-in-the-mailbox route either, because that’s kind of passive aggressive. How about either:
1. Inviting them over for dessert and coffee one night? Befriend them, be neighbourly, and while doing so, gently and kindly explain the problem and ask what could be done to make things easier for both households. As a parent myself, I can see both sides. There’s not a whole lot you can do about a noisy kid – kids are noisy. But there’s got to be something you can purchase at the hardware store that prevents a door from slamming, right? Maybe offer to help pay for that solution – if they’re parents and homeowners maybe money is tight.
2. Soundproof the party wall! It’s not the best solution and won’t drown out 100% of the noise but hopefully it’ll help a lot! http://forums.redflagdeals.com/sound-proofing-wall-between-semi-detached-houses-576128/
Before thinking of selling your house, try talking to them first. See if the problem can be solved by telling them about what you’re feeling. You never know, maybe they’ll be the ones to go away 🙂 Then if talking doesn’t help then go ahead and sell and make sure that you get a place where you will not have neighbors or noisy neighbors in particular.