Hey guys, asking for support and good energy here.
I rent. About 18 months ago I moved to a new town to get away from the steadily increasing congestion and meanness where I had been living, and to get the jump on an office relocation that my employer is going to perpetrate sometime this year.
I live in a upstairs garden apartment, large, airy, full of light, with flowering cherry trees around it and a huge deck overlooking a tree-shaded avenue. I'm on the end, and my apartment goes through the bulding so part faces the street and part faces away from the street. I can walk across the street to a shopping plaza with restaurants, a good grocery store, a drugstore, and my maildrop. Trees, grass, shade, blue sky, nice.
It was ideal for eight months, and then ten months ago a new tenant (a couple) moved in downstairs.
First impressions were bad. They camped in three parking spaces directly in front of the building for two solid weeks, then returned the trailer they'd used to move and camped in two spaces. [Lease says please only park one of your cars right in front, park others across. Everyone else does this.] Of course, one of the spaces they took was one I'd been using for eight months, but I didn't have any official right to it other than habit, so I sighed and moved my car to a paid covered space and tried not to hold it against them.
They then proceeded to make more noise than I have ever experienced. Running power tools outside on the patio. Blasting their stereo. And although the male half of the pair apparently got home before 4 PM daily - sometimes as early as 2:30 - the noise always started during dinner, or immediately after it, usually right after I came in the front door in the evenings.
Within three weeks I had decided to file a complaint, because I tried knocking on the door and they simply ignored my knock. But all of a sudden they quieted down, before I could say anything to anyone, and the woman even asked me to let them know if they were too noisy. So obviously one of the two other tenants in the adjacent units must have said something, or both of them did, or people further down the row, who like using their balconies at dinnertime without power saws and blaring radios adding to the ambience, did. Or they all did. This was last June or July.
Quiet it was thereafter until the downstairs tenant adjacent to these guys moved out, and new noisemakers moved in there. The two sets of them got into a sonic war at 8 PM on New Year's Eve that was so bad I called the police, and submitted a written complaint to the landlord on New Year's Day. There's no question that it WAS a noise war. My poor cats were terrified.
I have earplugs and use them. They might as well have been Kleenex.
This town has covenants, and noise is severely restricted after 9 PM, and even outside that time, if it's loud enough, it's considered violative. That's the reason I bothered to file a complaint.
In early January, both the male and female apologized to me and asked me to let them know if they were ever too loud. No problems, until March. Between the middle of March and this past week I've had eight episodes of serious noise trouble, ranging from 4 in the afternoon to 8 in the evening when it starts, all of it their stereo blasting on one side of the building so loudly that I hear it through the walls and floor on the other side. It's never just one song (which I could understand and ignore). It goes on for anywhere from half an hour to two and a half hours at a time.
The fourth time, I went downstairs, knocked, and was ignored. Round about the seventh time, I'd been sitting in my living room reading and didn't appreciate being driven out of it by my own furniture vibrating, so since they ignored my knock previously, I thumped the floor. They turned the stereo up in response to this.
So the next time, when the same thing started ten or so days later, at 4 PM, I waited a half hour, and it got louder, and finally I called my landlord's office, told them I was having a recurring noise problem and asked for someone to please come over and listen to what I was experiencing.
Now, normally when I have a crisis and call for help, there's never anyone around. But this time, someone was there, and they came right over. And they agreed that this was simply too loud for even 4:45 in the afternoon. So the office rep went downstairs and knocked on the door, and not only did the tenant not answer, but he turned the stereo up AGAIN. Thinking it was me, obviously.
For some reason, the rep was surprised by this response. She said it was spiteful (no disagreement here), and I told her that this was exactly what they did to me the last time, when I thumped on the floor. She asked me to prepare a written complaint, and told me she was reporting the incident to her management immediately.
I wrote up a complaint and included every incident from the last seven weeks, including the fact that these folks asked me to contact them and then ignored and/or retaliated when I tried to.
Folks, I could sure use prayers and good energy about this. I don't think the woman has been spiteful, most of the incidents have happened when her car was not here. But the guy surely has.
To a limited extent I can feel for him a little, but not much. He isn't blasting the stereo after 9 anymore, and the power tools are being used elsewhere. There's never been a problem with noise late at night or early in the morning.
But he doesn't need to make my living room vibrationally uninhabitable in order to enjoy the music he likes, and I can't get past the fact that this business of retaliating against me for doing as they asked is simply abusive.
Anyway, I feel very uncomfortable about running into these people, which so far I have managed to avoid doing. Damn. He's been a jerk, but I feel circumscribed. And I really don't want to move, not with Sophie terminally ill, I had some old furniture taken away just a few weeks ago and she cried and hid, thinking we were moving again. Besides, why should I have to pay to move, and give up what's been a perfectly lovely place to live otherwise? Let this guy pay to move somewhere else, where he can rupture his eardrums to his hearts' content.
Prayers please. Many thanks!
PS to our UK friends - we don't have ASBOs here - and how I wish we did!
