Neighbours children driving me mad!

[Electro Detective]

Guys there seems to be a misunderstanding that I am still living in Germany.

Apologies for that, I just moved back to my home country (Lebanon).

Will talk to the neighbours when I see them, till then I have  chosen to soundproof my ceiling.

It's a cemented ceiling and I was told by a local soundproofing co (fantoni) that what I need to do is create a false ceiling 30cm or so below the current one hung by steel strands and stuff the gap with very dense sound deadening material.

They said that a sound proofing perforated panel is an option instead of gypsum board but that stuff work better for isolating the sound within a room and not as effective at blocking incoming sounds and vibrations from the neighbours.

Should cost me around 3k $ for a 25 square meter room which I think is quite expensive but that includes the price of the perforated acoustic panels (not the dry wall option).

OP is going to be out of pocket 3K     that's a lot of test gear money blown for soundproofing that may or may not block out the annoying frequencies that affect his sleep

Can that stuff be tuned to suppress selected frequencies or is it a damping turkey shoot?


Time for dog poo and male cat pee to regularly appear at the noisy neighbours door perhaps? 

[tooki]

This is all why I made sure I bought a house and not a flat and preferred an end of terrace to a middle one. only one neighbour to listen to and they are fairly reasonable, even the one next to them that played music so load you can hear it "through" the neighbours have managed to grow out of it. complaining would be pointless as they know what they are doing and I'd like to keep my car in more or less one piece.

Currently paying my mortgage off as fast as I can so that I can move out, rent the place and use that rent to pay for something nicer.

Consider yourself fortunate to live somewhere where that is an option. Here in Switzerland, real estate is so expensive that even purchasing a flat is out of reach for most people. (A quick search on a real estate site shows the cheapest single-family home here in Zurich at 1.7 million CHF — about 1.8 million USD or 1.3 million GBP — and the absolute cheapest rowhouse, a little 91m^2 thing, at 650K CHF.) I'm pretty sure that the flat that I rent would cost somewhere around a million to purchase (rent control laws working in my favor to give me this place at, frankly, below market rate). ::sigh::

[Simon]

Well from what you are saying house prices and flat prices are quite high in Switzerland. Switzerland does indeed have a reputation for being expensive. We can't really help their and if we are talking relative values they seem to be around the same. I was extremely lucky in that my father had savings he was willing to lend me for a deposit and house prices had crashed and I found a house in the cheapest area of town. A bit of a dump (a few weeks ago the police were chasing someone down the other end of the street with a gun) but it's a house. I would have paid perhaps 30% less for a flat which I would never have truly owned and would properly have had to pay some sort of ground rent on. But if it was not for circumstances I would be homeless. As things stand I am not much better off now than I was when I bought my house for a mere £87,000. The value now has risen to around £120,000 now that prices are backup. So basically house price increases have outstripped my wage increases so the only of getting out of here is to leverage on the fact that I bought it at just the right time and I can afford to pay for it and if I am sappy with my money I can hopefully pay the mortgage off earlier than the bank anticipated and they use this house to fund another house. Rents are worth at the moment at least twice what a mortgage payment is so I would get more value from this property by using its red value than its actual property value to purchase another house. This is of course all in the future. And it doesn't matter what area you move to you can still have bad neighbours. It's just a case that at least in this country but lower cost housing tends to house people who are thugs which is part of the reason why they can't afford to live anywhere nicer. It is also an area where people are housed in social housing by councils and sometimes these people are also thugs and won't even work for a living. The class system in the UK is a farce. Because we don't know talking about money we have to call it something else. Classes about how much money you earn and how fancy a house you can afford. This is why often people in low cost housing by flashy cars to impress those who have no idea of where they live. I only other hand would rather drive the cheapest car I can and put the difference into my house.

But none of this addresses the problem. Only the original poster knows if he can afford somewhere nicer where perhaps he will have nicer neighbours again in view of the fact that people with more money tend to be those who know how to get on with people and therefore climb the social or should I say monetary ladder. On the other hand the upstairs neighbours might respond to a polite request that they give some consideration to the fact that the floors are not very thick. In this country floors between flats are no different to the floors in a house. In my house even though it is a solid 1947 build I can hear the cats jumping off the windowsill and landing on the floor. When I lived with my father briefly who was in a flat we could hear everything upstairs from people walking around to their arguments.

[tszaboo]

This is all why I made sure I bought a house and not a flat and preferred an end of terrace to a middle one. only one neighbour to listen to and they are fairly reasonable, even the one next to them that played music so load you can hear it "through" the neighbours have managed to grow out of it. complaining would be pointless as they know what they are doing and I'd like to keep my car in more or less one piece.

Currently paying my mortgage off as fast as I can so that I can move out, rent the place and use that rent to pay for something nicer.

Consider yourself fortunate to live somewhere where that is an option. Here in Switzerland, real estate is so expensive that even purchasing a flat is out of reach for most people. (A quick search on a real estate site shows the cheapest single-family home here in Zurich at 1.7 million CHF — about 1.8 million USD or 1.3 million GBP — and the absolute cheapest rowhouse, a little 91m^2 thing, at 650K CHF.) I'm pretty sure that the flat that I rent would cost somewhere around a million to purchase (rent control laws working in my favor to give me this place at, frankly, below market rate). ::sigh::

On the other hand in some regions of Switzerland they have laws protecting you from noise. AFAIK it is illegal to flush toilet on weekends at night if it would disturb the neighbors. I mean, even if this is not enforced, I like the mentality. Today I woke up, because the new tenant upstairs decided to do vacuum cleaning, so he started moving furniture and I guess play ping-pong with bowling balls.

And I would like the rest periods actually enforced. Like they cannot start construction work before 7AM. So what do they do? They turn up with their trucks before. Nobody works, but you have a truck in front of your window on idle, sometimes whirring the engine, usually backing up into an alley, going "beep beep beep". Yeah, that is not annoying at all. Then at 07:00:01 they start with 15 minutes of jackhammering.

I think part of the 21 century will be about increasing the quality of life, by reducing these disturbances. Like making furniture, where the door doesn't auto-slam disturbing eveyone in the 8 flats around you. Or getting rid of combustion engine. Or getting rid of construction workers, and having it nice quiet automated, between 10 AM - 4 PM. I think half the issues would be solved by not using 12th century construction materials for the buildings.

[Simon]

Unfortunately builders and road workers always have to remind you how important they are. And they make sure their importance is felt by how long a drag every job out. Here I think you are not supposed to make a noise after 11 o'clock. I would prefer 10 o'clock as having been aggravated all evening I'm hardly going to settle down and go to sleep the second the noise stops and I actually get into bed a little after 10 o'clock which scarcely gives me eight hours until I get up at about 6:30.

[ez24]

Perhaps you didn't understand my hardware's method.  The goal is to make the parents hear equally what you hear from being beneath the children's room, recognize that their children are actually jumping around. 

Maybe you could get a patent on it or start a kickstarter and sell them?

[madsbarnkob]

My upstair neighbours have two kids who do nothing but run around,jump and drop their toys on the floor creating lots of noise and it's driving me crazy!

I wake up at 6:20 AM on weekends when I usually sleep till 10 after a long night because they decide it's fair to let them make a racket at that ungodly hour.

Sleep disturbance is terrible since I have to wake up and go back to sleep every damn night many times until I wake up at my usual times.

What can I do? Should I talk to them about it or can they do nothing about it? They are children after all...

I'd love to soundproof my room but I don't think vibrations from jumping/running will be blocked unlike sound.

I am living a nightmare and would like some opinions on what can be done about it.

I used to have the same grasp of the world and someone else invading my private sphere, which at that point of my life clearly expanded outside of my own 4 walls.

Things change when you then have kids of your own.

You find out that these are things out of your control.

Kids does not develop a proper day/night rhythm, I can not even tell you when, our daughter is 4 years old now and its still not compatible with adults. Kids need to sleep 11 hours a night, when put in bed at 1900, that means you have them up again at latest 0600 in the morning, most of the time earlier. Now add that kids have a ton of nightmares, night terrors and being-afraid-of-being-left-alone-in-the-dark experiences, so you also get up along the night. Or get to sleep along your kids with a foot in your face.

Kids have absolutely zero understanding of their surroundings, there is only ME, motoric skills are far from fine tuned.

Kids are building their bodies and muscles, all the time, they are pre-programmed to always be on the move, jump, run, explore, climb etc etc, there is nothing you can do to stop this, if you tackle this and get passive kids that only sit and watch TV, well, good luck in the future with a limped physical development early in life.

Now what did we do to make life more tolerable for our neighbours, up and down too, we talked with them.

We tried to find solutions on when we were home, when neighbours were home, tried to find a way of scheduling noise to be at hours where it was of least nuisance.

We have had endless talks with our kid about how it is important to remember that there is other people in the building and noise just for the sake of making noise is bad.

But we can repeat this 60 times a day, there is simply no room or grasp in the kids mind for this kind of taking care of other people in a abstract plane like this.

Best of luck with living in a shared building, but remember that it comes with noise to do so.

We are now moving into our own house and it is also a relief to us that we are no longer make life intolerable for others.

Print out your own original post, keep it safe somewhere, wait until you have your own kids and they are around age 3-4, then find your printed out paper and read it again

[bd139]

I've got 31 years of combined experience with children. I disagree on every point.

[madsbarnkob]

I've got 31 years of combined experience with children. I disagree on every point.

You will have to elaborate on that, for it being a argument.

[BrianHG]

Guys there seems to be a misunderstanding that I am still living in Germany.

Apologies for that, I just moved back to my home country (Lebanon).

Will talk to the neighbours when I see them, till then I have  chosen to soundproof my ceiling.

It's a cemented ceiling and I was told by a local soundproofing co (fantoni) that what I need to do is create a false ceiling 30cm or so below the current one hung by steel strands and stuff the gap with very dense sound deadening material.

They said that a sound proofing perforated panel is an option instead of gypsum board but that stuff work better for isolating the sound within a room and not as effective at blocking incoming sounds and vibrations from the neighbours.

Should cost me around 3k $ for a 25 square meter room which I think is quite expensive but that includes the price of the perforated acoustic panels (not the dry wall option).

OP is going to be out of pocket 3K     that's a lot of test gear money blown for soundproofing that may or may not block out the annoying frequencies that affect his sleep

Can that stuff be tuned to suppress selected frequencies or is it a damping turkey shoot?


Time for dog poo and male cat pee to regularly appear at the noisy neighbours door perhaps? 

The sad point here is that if sound still makes it through, drummerdimitri will have lost 3k$ and be left with my disgusting 2$ 'earplug' hack here on page 1:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/neighbours-children-driving-me-mad!/msg1417536/#msg1417536
Note that orange apparently isn't the only color today, what's important is that bottom rim and that the surface of the foam is flat plastic like & once squeezed it re-inflates as slowly as possible.

[ez24]

I heard the Dakota (apt ?) building in New York has 3 feet of dirt between floors.  They do not have a sound problem.  Of course you have to be a billionaire to live there.

If the OP owns his place (this is too long to figure this out) then if he spends 1,000s, he might be increasing the value of his place.  Three feet of dirt did not hurt the value of the Dakota units.

[BrianHG]

I heard the Dakota (apt ?) building in New York has 3 feet of dirt between floors.  They do not have a sound problem.  Of course you have to be a billionaire to live there.

If the OP owns his place (this is too long to figure this out) then if he spends 1,000s, he might be increasing the value of his place.  Three feet of dirt did not hurt the value of the Dakota units.

I never thought of dirt, but, you are right, dirt may filter out more frequencies than concrete...

[Someone]

I heard the Dakota (apt ?) building in New York has 3 feet of dirt between floors.  They do not have a sound problem.  Of course you have to be a billionaire to live there.

If the OP owns his place (this is too long to figure this out) then if he spends 1,000s, he might be increasing the value of his place.  Three feet of dirt did not hurt the value of the Dakota units.

I never thought of dirt, but, you are right, dirt may filter out more frequencies than concrete...

Iron filings...
lead paste...
depleted uranium pellets?
How much money do you want to spend?

[Brumby]

I heard the Dakota (apt ?) building in New York has 3 feet of dirt between floors.  They do not have a sound problem.  Of course you have to be a billionaire to live there.

If the OP owns his place (this is too long to figure this out) then if he spends 1,000s, he might be increasing the value of his place.  Three feet of dirt did not hurt the value of the Dakota units.

I never thought of dirt, but, you are right, dirt may filter out more frequencies than concrete...

There's no "may" about it.  Concrete does not suffer plastic deformation in normal use.  Just about all energy imparted to it goes somewhere.  Dirt, on the other hand, will take a lot of that energy in the jostling of particles that are a lot more loosely confined than what you will find in concrete.

[Brumby]

I heard the Dakota (apt ?) building in New York has 3 feet of dirt between floors.  They do not have a sound problem.  Of course you have to be a billionaire to live there.

If the OP owns his place (this is too long to figure this out) then if he spends 1,000s, he might be increasing the value of his place.  Three feet of dirt did not hurt the value of the Dakota units.

I never thought of dirt, but, you are right, dirt may filter out more frequencies than concrete...

Iron filings...
lead paste...
depleted uranium pellets?
How much money do you want to spend?

You haven't been paying attention to the budget BrianHG has been running with - have you?

[cdev]

The Dakota is where John Lennon lived with his wife Yoko and their family, and where she still lives.

The classic 70s horror film "Rosemary's Baby" was filmed there.

---------

I just want to say, count your blessings.. You're lucky you dont live in San Francisco, where rents have been rising so fast landlords now actually hire people to drive their current, law abiding, rent paying good tenants out of the buildings for the simple reason that they are too stable and too reliable. Instead they want churn, new tenants who will pay exponentially increasing rents.

That means they hire workmen and other annoying people to make their tenants lives into a living hell until they move.

[BrianHG]

At my new apartment, back in September through December, new tenants on the first floor would blast their stereo between 11pm and 5am on Thursdays nights through Tuesday mornings.  They got kicked out...

[Brumby]

Tenants are easier to deal with than an owner/occupier.

[drummerdimitri]

I thinkl I made it clear that we are all owners of our appartments in this building.

Also keep in mind that these are highly luxurious units costing 1.6m $ so to be disturbed by noise kinda sucks at this price point 

[ez24]

I do not think the OP can use dirt.  The ceiling is hard to deal with and the false ceiling is probably his best advice.  Some products used in walls however is a drywall product that has a rubber type compound between layers.

A product I used is a locally made powder that is mixed with water.  It is polymer (glue) and sand.  It is used by Hollywood to coat polystyrene to make it look like plaster.   I have covered walls and ceilings (1/4 inch max) with it because it can cover defects very well and since it is just glue and sand, it sticks like glue.  For a  sound wall I used metal lath and made it 1/2 inch thicker. I used about 400 pounds (mass) and the wall was only about 8x8 feet.   Amazing stuff.  My guess for a 12x12 room you could add a mass of 1,000 pounds by just troweling it on to the ceiling (if you could get it). 

The store that sells it, is a commercial supply store.  I would check these type of stores out and tell them your problem.  Maybe you can find a specially product that would help.

Another "sticky" product with a lot of mass is stucco patching material. 

If me and money no object, I would put in another ceiling (not hanging).  I would use glue-lam beams that are bolted to the studs.

So there are some exotic products out there that can solve a lot of problems.

But I still like the bio-feedback method the best.

[med6753]

To the original poster....you've gotten some good advice in here and I really can't offer anything more other than hopefully you can resolve your noisy situation peacefully.

My situation: 1 bedroom apartment on the 2nd floor of a large 3 story house dating back to the 1860's that has been completely gutted and modernized. I have a separate living room, kitchen, and bath. One large apartment directly below me. One apartment on the 2nd floor with an a joining wall with our kitchens. A loft apartment on the 3rd floor directly over my living room and kitchen but luckily not over my bedroom. That's the layout. My lifestyle is that I work at night. My work hours are 8 PM to 4:30 AM. So I sleep during the day. Directly opposite of 99% of the rest of the world. This schedule can be extremely difficult if you have a family but I live alone so it works. 

Dealing with daytime noise so I can sleep can be a challenge. My best friend is a box fan which I run all year. During the Summer it's supplemented with a window A/C unit. With some exceptions that filters out almost all of the daytime noise. My landlord can even mow the lawn and usually I don't hear it. My phone is set to ringer/vibrate off. Friends/family are all aware of my schedule and they know if they call/text during the day I won't respond. I live in a rural area so the road in the front of my complex doesn't have a lot of traffic. But there is this moron redneck who lives a few houses down with a full size 4WD turbo diesel pickup with an open exhaust. It's very loud and he likes chomp on it and spool up the turbo until it reaches it's pop off with a loud hiss. Can't tell you how tempted I've been to shoot out his tires.

My neighbors for the most part are quiet but they do have their obnoxious moments. Next door to me is this mid-fifties woman who I can best describe as being short and almost as wide as she is tall. And living with her is her 30's something unemployed son who probably clocks in at over 400 pounds. Poster children for the new fat America. He is usually quiet. She on the other hand is one nasty person and I avoid her like the plague.  I don't think I've ever encountered someone so angry and unhappy. And she likes to park her fat ass in her kitchen (remember – joining walls) and either be complaining loudly on her phone, or bitching at her son, or even at her grandchildren when they visit. There are times I'm sitting in my kitchen and I have to listen to her loud crap. Luckily I can't hear it in my bedroom or we would be having a come to Jesus meeting.

Above me are 2 guys who just moved in this past November. And they are extremely unfriendly. Well, maybe not “unfriendly” but very reclusive. I met one of them for about 30 seconds. The other I haven't met at all. And that's OK. Leave me alone, I leave you alone. But one of them, or possibly both, is an exercise freak. I can appreciate wanting to stay fit and healthy. And I see them both going out an running. But when it's real cold they don't run outside. They run in place in their living room directly above me. You know what that sounds like? Elephants trying to bust thru my ceiling. It goes on for sometimes a half hour or more. Again, I don't hear it my bedroom or we would have a big problem. But geez...can't you get a gym membership? If I ever get to talk to these guys I might mention it. But you know how people can be sometimes. It might piss them off. Oh well, too bad.           
 

[nctnico]

I thinkl I made it clear that we are all owners of our appartments in this building.

Also keep in mind that these are highly luxurious units costing 1.6m $ so to be disturbed by noise kinda sucks at this price point 

Isn't there something like a home owners association? There has to be because apartment building need maintenance of shared things like roofs, elevators, hallways, etc.

Edit: the first step would be to talk to the neighbours above though.

[cdev]

What would work even better would be as I said before, to make a hanging ceiling that sits a small distance below your current ceiling, then (a new idea) you could fill the space between them with a layer of rigid foam insulation. I think that would be the best long term solution. Foam, especially that super dense "rigid foam", deadens sound extremely well. You could also deaden that by surrounding the wood or whatever supports with foam. Make sure its not exposed to any source of flame and meets fire codes. We have these great pink foam boards (they interlock) which is used in basements. Behind walls. Its a very good insulator and it also deadens noise a great deal.

make sure you meet fire codes.. I would ask a building engineer to give you a plan for your drop ceiling which was certified as meeting building codes for fire safety, and do your research. Flame retardants can also be toxic so keep that in mind when picking the foam to use. Do your research. In my experience the pink rigid foam (see pic below) does not smell at all.

[tooki]

This is all why I made sure I bought a house and not a flat and preferred an end of terrace to a middle one. only one neighbour to listen to and they are fairly reasonable, even the one next to them that played music so load you can hear it "through" the neighbours have managed to grow out of it. complaining would be pointless as they know what they are doing and I'd like to keep my car in more or less one piece.

Currently paying my mortgage off as fast as I can so that I can move out, rent the place and use that rent to pay for something nicer.

Consider yourself fortunate to live somewhere where that is an option. Here in Switzerland, real estate is so expensive that even purchasing a flat is out of reach for most people. (A quick search on a real estate site shows the cheapest single-family home here in Zurich at 1.7 million CHF — about 1.8 million USD or 1.3 million GBP — and the absolute cheapest rowhouse, a little 91m^2 thing, at 650K CHF.) I'm pretty sure that the flat that I rent would cost somewhere around a million to purchase (rent control laws working in my favor to give me this place at, frankly, below market rate). ::sigh::

On the other hand in some regions of Switzerland they have laws protecting you from noise. AFAIK it is illegal to flush toilet on weekends at night if it would disturb the neighbors. I mean, even if this is not enforced, I like the mentality. Today I woke up, because the new tenant upstairs decided to do vacuum cleaning, so he started moving furniture and I guess play ping-pong with bowling balls.

This is actually more urban legend than anything else. Some leases say "no showers after 10pm" or whatnot, but the law actually lays out that some activities (including toilet use, bathing, having sex, and children playing) are fundamental uses of a dwelling, and cannot be restricted, period. (So any such clauses are legally void.) It is established case law that one can do all of those things at any time, and none represent grounds for eviction, even if she's a screamer in bed. A nurse who works night shifts has every right to shower, poop, and make dinner when they get home at 3am. And kids are allowed to be kids.

For sure, the Swiss do tend to be conscientious of each other, but it's not as crazy restrictive as it's often made out to be.

I think part of the 21 century will be about increasing the quality of life, by reducing these disturbances. Like making furniture, where the door doesn't auto-slam disturbing eveyone in the 8 flats around you. Or getting rid of combustion engine. Or getting rid of construction workers, and having it nice quiet automated, between 10 AM - 4 PM. I think half the issues would be solved by not using 12th century construction materials for the buildings.

Yep. This is something the Swiss are good at -- building solid buildings that don't carry much noise.

[cdev]

Tenants in Switzerland get a legal right to buy their apartments as condos?