New here, long vent...suggestions please

18 years ago

Okay, my husband and I have lived in our current apartment for about 2 months now and lived in a different apartment for 2 years before moving here. Since moving in, we've had issues with the neighbor upstairs and I'm really getting frustrated. It started out with loud music, as in loud enough to feel vibrations in our walls/furniture in our apartment. At the time, the girl upstairs had several people over and I did NOT feel comfortable going upstairs alone to say something. Our move in packet had instructions to relay any concerns about parking, noise, litter, etc to the resident manager. So I did call but only got voice mail.

The loud music continued daily for several weeks and for the most part unless one of us was trying to sleep, we did our best to ignore it. We have said spoken with our leasing office about this as well now and tried to get them to understand that my husband works extremely varied and usually long hours. So to us, 2 in the afternoon may be bedtime after working a 16 hour shift and music loud enough to wake a normally sound sleeper is just not acceptable at any time.

Now the music issue has been reduced to about once a week but we're having other problems such as groups of loud people in her apartment, loud voices out on her patio where she seems to like to make all her phone calls, doors and cupboards slamming, loud and heavy footsteps, and I swear the girl has butter fingers because more things get dropped on her floor/our ceiling than I can even believe. We haven't said anything about this but once at 2am I admit that I was frustrated enough from lack of sleep to pull out the old broom stick to the ceiling to which I got a stomping reply from upstairs.

Then last week I went down to the laundry room to do a load. When I came back down the hallway, someone had put a half opened package of spoiled round steak in front of our door. It was placed there within a matter of 3 minutes of me being down the hall and I could here loud laughter from the apartment upstairs when I found it. My apartment is on the garden level and at the end of the hall way so it was obviously placed on purpose. I wanted to call the resident manager but my husband thought it would only make things worse. I did mention it to the leasing office when I went to pay rent though and they told me to call if it happened again.

I don't like being on edge like this though...wondering what's going to happen next, if I'll be able to sleep that night and function the next day. My poor husband is so sleep deprived and I'm getting there myself. I don't know how we're going to make it until July. I realize that we do live in a college town but I feel that we have a right to be able to comfortably live and sleep in our own home. Does anyone have any suggestions, please?

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Comments (5)

talley_sue_nyc
18 years ago
I would start documenting very firmly everything that's going on--keep a log, and DO call the managment over to see what's going at AT THE TIME.

Try to lay a case for breaking your lease due to the violation of any "quiet enjoyment" clause.

Or, if the building or complex is big enough, ask them to move you.
pebbles396
18 years ago
You could call the police - the steak thing falls under mischevous acts. Maybe she just needs to be scared.
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kweenie97
Original Author
18 years ago
Thanks for your suggestions guys. I did end up calling the police about the noise this weekend because yet again our resident manager had her phone set to go directly to voice mail. I've never been able to speak to her directly and she doesn't return calls either. So within seriously like 20 seconds of hanging up with the police Friday night the music upstairs stopped in mid song. It was really kind of funny. So I called back and told the police it had stopped for the time being. The dispatcher laughed and said not to hesitate to call again if it started back up.
rivkadr
18 years ago
I'd definitely start taking a log, if I were you. Also, try looking for a decibel meter -- you can find them cheap on Ebay. Every time you hear them (especially music), be sure to record the decibels. It doesn't hurt if you have a video or sound recorder to record the noise levels -- I once was able to convince the management of an apartment to do something about my neighbor's noisy parrot when I played 10 minutes of continuous screeching for them (my requests to the neighbor to please move the bird to a different room or to cover its cage went nowhere; when management asked, something finally happened.)
Flowerkitty
18 years ago
Yes, log everything. My aunt used to work in the state welfare department and she had to attend a lot of court hearings. I was surprised when she told me judges put a lot of worth on journals. After all, you could be lying. But I guess long detailed accounts tend to reflect at least what you think is happening.

If you keep a journal, don't just write things down once a week. Everytime anything happens enter date, day-of week, time, and full description of what happened, exact words that are said. Be sure to make an entry for every single day. If nothing happens that day, write down that nothing happened today. If you use a computer, print out the notes each week, and do not go back and change the entries for that week later on. You can add notes at the bottom if you remember something but make a point not to alter it once you have finished the week. This increases the credibility of your notes. If a judge looks you in the eye you can state truthfully you never revised the entries.

I sympathize with the steak story. I lived in a 'luxury' apartment surrounded by woods. Pets were allowed and dogs were to be walked in the woods. A neighbor would walk her dog to my lawn and let it go there. I got mad and yelled 'why can't you take your dog in the woods like you are supposed to?' She went off in a huff, and the next morning my second floor balcony was full of dog doo-doo.