I recently moved into this loft suite after having a floor-level two bedroom (concrete floors, bedrooms on either side of the living room).
My neighbour is, to put it nicely, a miserable old hag. She will not quit banging on my wall when I listen to my stereo. She banged on my wall when I was listening to The Eagles, FFS. She's lucky I don't listen to hip-hop. She actually banged on the wall while I was watching South Park and the intro riffs by Les Claypool were playing.
Yesterday, she banged on my wall and I finally got tired of it. I went over, knocked on her door, and asked what exactly the issue was. She said "Your bass is too loud". As I had left the stereo playing, I asked if I could come in and hear what she was hearing. She lets me in, and I can hear, very faintly, a bit of bass... much, MUCH quieter than, say, ambient noise if you opened a window. But you really have to pay careful attention to hear it. So I asked "Is this all you're hearing?" She answered yes and I was dumbfounded. Her refrigerator was making more noise just by running. Of course, she also doesn't have her TV or anything on either.
Me: "Well, I'm not sure what to say, I'm listening to my stereo at a very reasonable listening volume, the subwoofers are already turned down to the point they barely do anything."
Her: "Well it's too loud."
Me: "I'm not listening too early in the day, or too late at night, the stereo is always off at 9 PM."
Her: "I don't care what time of day it is".
I stammer, trying to figure out how exactly to respond reasonably to an unreasonable person (answer is: you can't). She goes on....
Her: "Don't you have the bluetooth, you can use bluetooth..." *motions to suggest she's telling me to listen using bluetooth headphones*
Are you kidding me?
It was pretty well at that point that I said "Well, I'm trying to broker some sort of understanding between us, but I guess that's the end of that" and left her apartment. I immediately spoke to my landlord. No other tenants have complained (I have one on either side of me, and one immediately below me) and she said that she's heard far worse noise in her own suite but as long as the noise isn't completely obnoxious and ends at a reasonable time (10 PM) then she doesn't care. The landlord is clearly on my side of the issue.
Of course, I'm still a little concerned that she's going to keep whining about it. So I did some research on
Calgary's noise by-laws (See page 12/Part 9) and got out a decibel meter to gather some information.
From reading the by-laws as they are written:
From the
Point of Reception (where the neighbour can hear the noise), the sound would have to be
greater than 65 dBA during daytime hours (or 5 dBA higher than Ambient Sound Levels if they exceed 65 dBA).
Over a one hour period, measured
from where I sit in my living room, the average dBA is 69.8.
That means that the noise would have to be such that it would basically be the equivalent of me moving my stereo
into her suite to create the same levels of noise.
She hasn't banged on the wall again yet, but I'm sure she will at some point.
Has anyone else dealt with a similarly annoying neighbour? It seems like I am just stuck listening to this woman banging on my damn wall until she moves out / dies from being miserable to everybody. I don't think I'm being unreasonable whatsoever in that there's an expectation of 'some' noise living in a residential building.