divine angst

Advice from any quarter is welcome.

Mr. Angst and I, as you may have read, have moved into a new apartment. We are living mostly full-time in our new apartment, even though it doesn’t have much stuff in it yet. We have a TV, though, and an unpacked kitchen (though very little food here, yet).

So here’s the advice part:

Our downstairs neighbors are loud. I don’t mean generally loud, I mean My Floor Is Vibrating From The Bass In Their Music loud. Today, Mr. Angst spoke with them twice about turning the music down. I spoke with them once. As I understand it, they did not turn the music down for very long after he spoke to them; after I did–approximately 10 minutes after–they turned the music off or down and we haven’t heard it since.

What do we do when they turn the music back up? Do we continue to ask them nicely (but firmly, of course) to turn it down since our floor is vibrating? Do I pull the law student, I Am Studying For Class Right Now, card again?

I understand that we have a number of administrative recourses. We can complain in writing to them. We can complain in writing to our landlord. We can call the police (though that is certainly a futile exercise). But I am not at all convinced that any of these recourses are worth the time (and postage) spent on them. Various websites, found via a search, don’t offer much else in the way of advice. One suggests inviting your noisy neighbors in “for coffee and cake” to “chat” about the situation. Our neighbors have a drum kit in the basement and Mt. Angst thinks he saw one of them rolling a joint–and there are three of them, with a fourth who’s “just staying for a while”–so I don’t think inviting them in for coffee and a chat is going to be terribly helpful.

So does anyone have any personal advice for getting one’s neighbors to understand how loud they are? How about doing so without becoming That Neighbor, the bitchy, pestery, awful one? Please, help!

We spent our first night in our new apartment. It was a short night; we didn’t finish doing stuff until close to 1 am, and we got up at 5 am to do two more loads of stuff before we had to take our rent car back. But it was a night, and it wasn’t all bad.

OK, well, maybe it wasn’t great. We started with our brand-new IKEA sofa-bed/futon thing in the living room, but that just didn’t work. First, there was a block party in the area. Second, our neighbors had people over AFTER the block party, and they were sitting on their front porch, being loud. Third, the train runs close to our building (like, reach out and touch close) and they’re doing weekend construction on that segment, so there were chainsaw noises.

Once we moved the bed into the bedroom, though, things got better. The bedroom doors close tightly against the floor and it’s at the back of the building and the window appears to be a better window. So we slept for four hours, got up, moved some more stuff, and came back to crash for three more hours.

Right now, I think we’re both a little shellshocked. We knew our street was a lively street and there would be street noise. But we didn’t know how MUCH street noise, and we didn’t know our windows would let in so much of it. This morning, though, we discovered why the windows let in so much noise–they are open at the top. Somehow, the upper panes are sliding down in the frames, and each window appears to be open about an inch or two at the very top. So we’re going to have to do something about that. More to the point, our LANDLORD is going to have to do something about that. It will give him a chance to see our paint job…hehehe.

So the move is going…OK. We have a lot of stuff left at the old apartment, including all of our food, cleaning supplies, and a lot of cables and things that we’d like to have HERE. Oh, and all of our real furniture.

This week will be one of the least fun of my life, I think, but when it’s all over we’ll be living in a new apartment in a new neighborhood with more space and a better kitchen. Right now, looking at the old place and the new place, I feel like it’s a wash–neither wins out over the other. Hopefully I’ll feel differently about that in a couple of weeks.