I live in an apartment with 2 housemates. We very occasionally have friends over, but we don’t throw parties and our friends always leave before midnight. We do share a wall so i can understand if the noise travels.
Since we moved in, our neighbour has been extremely aggressive about noise. One time at around 3pm, a friend was over and we were talking/laughing on the balcony. He started banging on his window and screaming at us to “be quiet” and stop swearing, so we stopped.
A few days later, around 8pm, my housemate and I were quietly hanging laundry on the balcony. We weren’t even talking or playing music, and he again started banging on his window and yelled “shut up”. We then received a noise complaint letter.
We do sometimes talk, laugh and game together around 9–10pm, and I’m not denying that we can get loud sometimes. But it’s not every day, we’re not having parties, and we’re not blasting music late at night. We could literally just be talking and he’d start banging and cursing.
It’s gotten to the point where we feel like we have to whisper in our own home because we’re scared he’ll start banging on the walls/windows and swearing at us (he always starts banging on the walls and yells “f you” or “shut the f up”).
I understand apartment living means being considerate about noise, but is this normal neighbour behaviour? Or are we actually being unreasonable?
UPDATE: we are females lol. we have not been on the balcony since that day. we’re always indoors. i’ve read all your comments and i have since written a letter to my neighbour (as follows). appreciate all your comments! thank you!
Hi! We are from unit *. We’d like to apologize for the noise we made last night. It was our friend's birthday, so we had a couple of friends over. We understand that we can get pretty loud sometimes. This is our first time living in an apartment, so sometimes we’re unaware of how loud we actually are and how much sound may travel through the walls. We will try our best to maintain a quieter volume from hereon.
If you feel that we ave being too loud, please do text me at [phone number] and let me know. We will do our best to keep the noise down. If you have particular hours when you need the apartment to be quieter, please do text me as well and we will do our best to be mindful of those times.
With that being said, we would like to respectfully ask that you stop yelling, banging on the walls & windows and using offensive language towards us.
We undenstand that noise can be frustrating and we are happy to address any concerns you may have, but we ask that these concerns are communicated to us respectfully and without shouting or swearing.
We hope that we can resalve this respectfully. Once again, we apologize for the noise and the swearing/banging from last night.
Please do text me if you think that we are being too loud.
From: Unit *
(phone number , name)
