So when it comes to apartment living, what's worse?

[Deja Q]

Poll question: So when it comes to apartment living, what's worse?

[mainegreen]

1. neighbors beating each other.

[alphafemale]

20. That'd be mine.

To the point of calling the cops because of the screams and the body slams against the wall. Then the next day they are chatting you up trying to figure out whether it was you or the neighbors on the other side who called them on it.


Creepy

[rug]

2. Electronic noise of any type from any direction.

[Arugula Latte]

3. Other: Someone's cigarette smoke invading your space.

x(

[Sebastian Doyle]

29. Yeah, that's the worst.

I have exactly one window in this apartment that actually opens, and it's not too much to ask to have breathable air coming through it.

[Arugula Latte]

30. You have my sympathies. "Being able to breathe" should be a given in your own home.

[rcrush]

4. I have no problems with my apartment.

I like apartment living.

[Skittles]

6. I did until bigfoot moved upstairs

to hear every step a person makes is the absolute worst

[madinmaryland]

10. Sounds like a good ASSKICKING is in line for them!

[Skittles]

11. everytime I hear her, she hears me

via a broomstick on the ceiling :D

[geomon666]

31. Neither do I

My walls are thick concrete too so I can pretty much blast my tv or music without disturbing the neighbors.

[Skittles]

5. noises on the ceiling

definitely the worst

[Odin2005]

7. The, err, "Romantic interludes".

Though my GF and I are guilty of it sometimes. :yoiks:

[myrna minx]

42. My theory on "romance" noise is that it is rather finite. I'd rather listen to that instead of

my neighbors stomping or horrible music. I had neighbors that would do it every other day at the same time so that my friends and I called it "Sex O'clock". They would go at it from 6 to 6:20--much less time than a whole Brittney Spears album. :D

[CTyankee]

45. We had those "sounds" from the neighbor's teenage daughter and we live in a house!

The bedroom of our house is directly across from our neighbor's bedroom and in the summer the teenage girl would have her BF over. Being summer our windows and their windows were open. The girl and this guy boffed in other rooms, too, since the neighbor on the OTHER side of their house heard similar "sounds." Mostly they were the girl screaming "Eff me, eff me!"

Mercifully, this family has now moved. The new people are pretty quiet but they have 2 pitbull puppies in the backyard...the only pitbulls in the entire neighborhood...

[DarkTirade]

8. Unfortunately the only friendly neighbors I ever had at my last apartment...

... were the upstairs neighbors whose kids seemed to think that pretending to be a herd of elephants was the most fun they could have all day. And I mean ALL GODDAMN DAY. :P

Still, I'd rather have my sleep interrupted than have to deal with the surly assholes who moved in after they left.

[Lucian]

9. It's a toss up between cigarette smoke and noises.

[REP]

12. Non-stop screaming children

Not regular kid-noise, but SCREAMING. For fucking HOURS. Outside my apartment. Well, not anymore. Management had a talk with their parents about the 'quiet enjoyment' clause and pointed out where the play area is.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

13. better than trailers

or cardboard boxes, both of which I have habitated
or, on edit and reflection...
barracks, dorms, or shared houses in student slums

[alarimer]

14. I don't care about the romantic interludes.

They never last very long! LOL. I am not sure who I feel sorry for, him or her.

But apparently I have a heard of elephants living upstairs. I don't understand why they have to STOMP all the time.

[Eyerish]

15. Everytime my upstairs neighbor is about to get it on with this GF he blasts...

I shit you not...RUSH... Tom Sawyer particularly, as loud as he can get away with. Usually it's only 15 minutes of the ceiling squeaking but still...I can't hear Rush anymore without cringing...:scared: :cry:

For that reason I picked upstairs...

[SoxFan]

49. Ah, Romance!

Nothing says "I Love You" quite like libertarian prog-rock!

[flvegan]

16. Having a roomate.

[krispos42]

18. Having a roommate who bails out on you

And not telling you he hasn't paid the rent or the power bill for 2 months.


And having to beg the bank to give you a couple of days to move your shit into self-storage while you crash at the house of somebody you barely know.


And her fiancee, and two kids, and her brother and HIS fiance... and the idiot you bailed on you and HIS kid.


And two dogs, two cats, and a guinea pig.




:grrr:


It's been a lousy 3 weeks...

[flvegan]

21. Sorry to hear that, krispos42.

That sucks.

[krispos42]

36. Yeah, I'm a bit bitter...

:-)

[Sequoia]

48. I had to tell one to leave 'cause she wouldn't stop talking.

EVER. Some people are way too needy in that they can't stand to be alone for a minute.

[dropkickpa]

17. Romantic interludes

I live in an over/under duplex. It's great, TONS of space, my upstairs neighbor is rarely around at the same times me and Dropkid are, so our extreme loudness doesn't disturb him (we are shitty neighbors, I freely admit it, between Dropkid and the dog playing soccer in the house and us yelling because we're just loud people in general, we suck from the hours of 4pm-8pm M-F and all day on the weekend when the weather is crappy, which is all winter long), and we don't care about his loudness either since our schedules just don't coincide very often.

But, being as the place is so old (built in 1925) there is *no* sound proofing (I can hear when he takes a leak, series!!). So, *every* Sunday night, from 12:30-1am, I get to hear him and his girlfriend going at it squeaka squeaka squeakasqueakasqueaka moanmoan (his bedroom is right above mine). Any other night of the week I wouldn't give a rats ass as I'd be asleep, but since I fucking hate waking up on Monday mornings ANYWAY and always have trouble sleeping sunday nights, it always keeps me up and I can't fall asleep until 3am, and I get up at 6am. If it weren't so predictable and boring I probably wouldn't object as much, either, but it is exactly the same every week.

[sasquatch]

19. My neighbors like playing their sound system so loud it shakes my floors

x(

[WildEyedLiberal]

22. I had an upstairs neighbor who I SWEAR threw furniture against the walls

I have NO idea what else could have made such a godawful racket. This was at like 3 and 4AM, too. They had loud parties and stomped around a lot, but then there would just be this colossal building-shaking THUMP. I called the cops on them twice.

[Common Sense Party]

33. Sorry. That was me. Some people sleepwalk. I sleep-rearrange.

I wish you hadn't called the cops. That wasn't cool.

[last_texas_dem]

23. Upstairs neighbors (literally) falling down drunk

Stomping is one thing, but I was pretty sure the ceiling above my head was about to cave in on a couple of Friday nights at my previous apartment!

[OmahaBlueDog]

24. When I was in college we had a combo deal

In 1984-86, I lived in an apartment above the "Happy Burrito" near 17th and Webster in Downtown Oakland, CA.

We had a female neighbor who was not in the best of mental health.

So, she'd have a loud romantic interlude period. Honestly, my roommate and I kinda liked tbat. But, after a few nights of romance, once that interlude ended for the evening, she'd went on a long, loud crying jag screaming "he left me" for about an hour and a half. This went on (off and on) for a few weeks. That was not easy to deal with.

Then, there was the morning. A bright, early sunday morning (about 6: 30 AM). I heard shrieking, but I was 80% asleep and all I could think was that somebody's kid was crying and wishing it would stop. My roommate, OTOH, sprang fully awake, ran downstairs, and confronted a man and a woman arguing. The man decided he'd had enough and took off. The woman (whom he brought to the apartment while we waited for the cops) said that the man had a gun and wanted to rape her. What my roommate did was about the bravest thing I've ever witnessed. Please forgive the digression from the OP.

[LostInAnomie]

25. My neighbors complaining to me about my stomping around...

... loud TV, and romantic interludes. Makes me so mad I just want to start smoking in my chair next to the vents.

[quakerboy]

26. I purely love

Neighbor kids. My apartment is in the front. And there is no "play area". So the kids from all three surrounding buildings play right below our windows every day. And they like to scream. And all the parents have our apartment between us and them, so they don't provide any supervision, but instead hide in back away from the noise.

I love that I am the only one with no parking space.

And I really love when my neighbors wash all 4 of their cars early Saturday morning. All 4 cars that have pretty ridiculous sound systems. They they blast while washing them. That blasts into their garage, which happens be underneath my apartment and which turns our whole apartment into an reverb chamber. I REALLY love that.

[Broken_Hero]

27. Just about...everything

I hated apartment living, and couldn't wait to get a house, out in the sticks/country, where heaven forbid...I can fire up a grill without everyone thinking its "party" time and eating my damn food....

My experiences with apartment living aren't that good...I know a few Duers around here know of Valley Green out in Sactown...dead bodies in cars in the parking lot, ghetto birds flying overhead 3-4 times a week, guys...running from the cops, busting through your wall, and going out your front door....


:D

[GoddessOfGuinness]

28. I once had an upstairs neighbor who broke her leg...

in two or three places. It was a nasty break, and I felt badly that she had to be in a cast for such a long time...especially since I lived directly below her, and she was an extra early riser.

[Common Sense Party]

32. When the upstairs neighbors used their garbage disposal, it would shoot

up out of our washing machine drain pipe. It was disgusting.

[Common Sense Party]

34. Another other: cockroaches.

Lived in a guanohole in Hermitage, Tennessee once. We cleaned that apartment top to bottom when we moved in. It didn't matter. There were cockroaches throughout the whole building. Once I saw them inside the glass front door of the microwave. We only lasted there three months.

[jobycom]

35. Two cat limit.

I'd otherwise have more, plus a dog.

[KamaAina]

47. Try a no-cat limit.

It's so bad out here there was actually a move at the legislature a couple of years ago to outlaw no-pets clauses. (Alas, it failed.)

Tack on the busiest firehouse in the state two blocks down, the never-ending sewer construction, and there you have it -- pretty much hell on Earth.

[jobycom]

51. Is this HI or LA?

[KamaAina]

52. HI. NOLA is a cat town all the way.

That was one of the first things I noticed down there. Cats are everywhere -- on people's porches, in front yards, etc.

[LibDemAlways]

37. Back in the 70's I was living in an apartment near a college and

the idiot next door was fixated on "You're So Vain" by Carly Simon. He played it day and night for hours on end through very thin walls. He also must have been a complete slob because I had a steady stream of insects in the kitchen, which backed up to his. Finally, I had to move. It was awful.

[bikebloke]

38. Stereo Pigs

My last upstairs neighbour thought the building was his own private nightclub, blasting his stereo with super heavy bass. At all hours. He ignored all civilized entreaties by other neighbours and the condo association. Due to stress and sleep deprivation, I was making dumb mistakes at work. If I had lost my job, I would have shelved non-violence and become the law.

Suddenly he moved. And I started sleeping better.

[Deep13]

39. Neighbors' stereo at concert hall loudness while I'm studying for the bar exam. nt

[Withywindle]

40. Other - I have a special case.

I live on the third floor of an four-story Victorian building.

My upstairs neighbor doesn't let people smoke in her place. OK, fine. However, all her friends seem to smoke. So whenever she has a party, which is often, in addition to the usual loud music and drunk whooping, there is an ENDLESS parade of shrieking trixies in huge stompy clogs storming up and down the narrow wooden Victorian staircase right outside my door, as they go outside to smoke in large posses, yelping and whooping outside my window and waking up the neighborhood, then going back in. She has BIG parties. There are DOZENS of people doing this constantly until 4 AM.

On Halloween night, I might or might not have stepped out of my door and told a flock of bimbos in slutty-nurse outfits and beer hats that I had to get up at dawn to go canvass for Obama in Indiana the next day, and if I slept through it and McCain won the election by a few voters in Indiana I didn't get a chance to schmooze, it would be ALL THEIR FAULT. They did actually look horrified and apologetic, but alas, they had the usual drunken-bimbo attention span.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

41. What used to bug me most during my days of apartment living in college towns

was the abundance of pea brains who cranked their stereos up to full volume and then pointed the speakers OUT the window to "serenade" the whole neighborhood.

I once had to leave town early to make a meeting, and the night before, some fraternity, the brains of whose members were obviously addled by exposure to excessive sound waves, held an outdoor dance with full-volume music that lasted till three A.M.

The music was loud enough with the windows closed, and when I opened the windows to figure out who the offenders were (there were three fraternities within nuisance distance), the sound was so loud that I literally could not tell which direction it was coming from.

I called the cops, but being in a college town, they were completely uninterested in enforcing the noise regulations. Their attitude was, "If we went around breaking up every noisy party, we'd be doing nothing else."

And if any of you currently youthful DUers are guilty of excessive noise at night, remember that your musical tastes are not the center of the universe, nor is your desire to party hearty, and that people in the real world have legitimate reasons for wanting to sleep (an essential human need) that trump your desire to get wasted in a wall of sound.

(Oh, and I'm not being a crabby old lady. I felt this way when I was young.)

[Arkansas Granny]

43. The only time I lived in an apartment, I would swear that the lady upstairs

let her kids play with bowling balls. She also moved every stick of furniture in her apartment on Sunday mornings starting at 7:00 a.m.

[StrongBad]

44. One word: Subwoofers

Ugh!

[peacefreak]

46. New neighbor throwing boulders off the stone wall

behind my apartment & is offering the kids money to play with him. Oh yeah, he's making a lot of friends around here. I hope he doesn't last long.

[EastTennesseeDem]

50. I find my neighbor's fuckscapades to be pretty funny.

Funny to the point of me doing everything in my power to keep from laughing as loud as they're fucking.

It's like, do they think I can't hear them?