Rants

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I'm going to write to the landlords reporting their behaviour upstairs because they are really noisy all night, they seem to be up all the time, I don't hear the baby crying so that must be asleep, but it sounds like they are always doing noisy activities in the bedroom above our bedroom (not sex) all through the night. Yesterday I was rudely woken up at 5am by a strange noise above that sounded like they were scraping a rake up and down the floor. Now it is 12.45am and they are thumping about up there, doing countless miles of walking across the room. WHY DON'T THEY JUST GO TO BED??! !

Yes I know I'm awake too but I'm not making a loud noise. I'm just laying quietly in bed on my phone typing this post. I'm not walking around the room several times, and even if I did it probably wouldn't disturb them because I'm downstairs. They need to consider that there are people below them. It's not rocket science. I think people just do this on purpose because they somehow know that I dislike noise. Or the landlords just give people with noisy habits upstairs apartments, like people with insomnia that must do noisy activities all night, or people with agoraphobia that are there 24/7, or people with OCD that must vacuum 5 times a day, or people that can't stand carpets so they have to have hardwood floors in every room, or people with babies that cry more than the average baby.

I'm going to say to the landlords that they're up all night stamping across the room and banging about. They just need to be made aware that they're making a lot of noise. I've tried the old-fashioned banging a broom on the ceiling but that doesn't make a difference, and I don't want to confront them myself by knocking on their door or writing a note.

Anyway, @Pepe I still don't understand the joke about pillows. Please explain it to me.

what joke about pillows?

Pepe posted a picture of pillows and said this will help cope with the noise. It's supposed to be a joke or something but I don't quite get it.

You really should write and if possible, make recordings. In any event you should certainly make contemporaneous notes but, respectfully, log the events without your feelings about them - those are better summarised in an "emotional harms" statement accompanying the notes.

These logs will carry much more weight if they describe the events occurring over a few weeks, which should help dispel any "but it's only very occasionally" countering. If you're able to establish a long-running series of repeated events this should go a long way to backing claims of a continual nuisance - which in turn, would provide your landlord with more ammunition when he speaks to your neighbors.

You are entitled to peacefully hold your tenancy without nuisance from the landlord - or other tenants.
If you have a written tenancy agreement check for clauses covering noise and/or antisocial behavior. These would normally be written in terms of what the tenant (you) should not do but of course, that applies equally to your noisy neighbors.

This, or related links on the page, might be useful: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/housi ... greements/

I started having gluttony again.
I can't spit them out.

Guilty haunts me.

Hate feeling like this. I feel like i am constantly trying to hide the fact that i am autistic/different. My parents both ignore the issue and would rather get angry at me when i share my feelings. And my therapist isn't available.

I think I may record their noise. It occurs all day, every day. I thought these neighbours would be quieter than the agoraphobic, insomnic obsessive cleaner we had before, but it turns out they're more noisier. Last night (at about midnight) I was sitting in the living-room quietly reading a magazine, when I heard their thundering footsteps above for about 20 minutes, then all of a sudden there was a huge bang that made me jump 6 feet in the air. Honestly, I really do not know what they do. It's making me a nervous wreck.

Good - gather ammunition before entering a battle!

My boyfriend won't let me do it as he fears it might cause unwanted trouble. He's the type to prefer not to get involved with neighbours too much. I do understand where he's coming from but at the same time I really want the neighbours to be aware that we can hear them all day and all night. I was thinking of writing a note but I don't know what to write without sounding confronting.

I think it's karma. When I was a kid I was a nightmare to live next door to (even though we lived in a family house with a large garden, not a small apartment above people). The man who lived next door hated me. So now I think I'm getting karma from all that. But like I said, I'd rather hear noise next door or underneath than above. Living below noisy people is the worst.

I really don’t believe “karma” has much to do with your neighbors making noise.

There's nothing worse than having upstairs neighbours sometimes. They might not realise that they are making a noise.

My neighbour bangs on her ceiling to me when I'm doing something completely innocent like rowing on my rowing machine. I had to adapt it so it made less noise.

I had an upstairs neighbour once who had a dog and I could hear him jumping and playing at the night time. It was really annoying for me but they were oblivious to the noise it was making.

Are you on speaking terms with your neighbours? Do you think you could approach them about the noise without it becoming like a war zone?

Glad to see you have taken my advice.

You could suggest that the floor could be carpeted if it isn't already.

I prefer the non-confrontational approach in these situations too.
But this is the purpose of submitting reports to your landlord, to ensure you don't need to get involved - it shouldn't be up to a tenant to enforce tenancy clauses with other tenants.

It's not.

And who will pay for it?

As a landlord myself, tenant's need to act in a "neighbourly" manner. Basically they need to avoid causing trouble with the neighbours.

I've sent several warnings out to a number of tenants over the years and was in the process of evicting one for poor conduct with neighbors a year ago. Most recent warning was two weeks ago for loud parties late at night.

Landlords can certainly intimidate tenants but the legal clout they have is up to a judge to decide if eviction notices are served as a result. I use warning sparingly but use them with malice intent as a last resort.

The downside of telling the landlord of problems is that they will or won't tell the tenant who made the complaint irrespective of the landlord being the council, a housing association or a private landlord. It's surprising what can slip from even the local authorities if you poke and prod them. I've successfully poked the local council into "revealing" info on the outcome of their county court case of an ex tenant. They will never tell me explicitly but will always knowingly give me enough info to read between the lines.

My housing association ripped out the laminate flooring from the previous tenant before I moved in here because they said it was too noisy for the downstairs people. I couldn't afford to put carpets down and so the floorboards were bare for about two years so the problem was made worse.

My previous upstairs neighbour got rid of all her carpets and just had bare floorboards because she was an obsessive compulsive cleaner and thought carpets were germy or something. But these apartments did originally have carpets when they were first built, so I think the landlords should have put carpets back in before the new neighbours moved in. They have a baby so I'd have thought they'd want rugs or whatever for the baby when he's crawling or kicking about on the floor. It would be a lot less noisy for us down below.

Sometimes I can hear them all night - even with earplugs in and the fan going. There is no way to block it out. It makes me really mad and my boyfriend says "just ignore it". I'm sorry but ignoring stuff is almost impossible when you have ADHD.