Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Is your insulation so bad between floors that it's possible a 4 week old, 1 pound kitten playing and running around would wake you up if it's in the bedroom above you?
Is that even possible?
Here's the situation...We recently moved into an upstairs apartment. In the past we've always tried to be soft walking neighbors, and when communicating with my downstairs neighbors they've always said how they rarely hear us at all.
Anyway, we just rescued the tiniest little baby kitten and we're keeping it in the 2nd bedroom before we introduce it to my older cat.
I was in there tonight for awhile (I'm a nightowl) and the kitten had the zoomies. I'm talking tiny kitten paws on a carpet!
Then I heard pounding from downstairs! The kitten was startled and stopped, then ran across the room again and furious pounding again.
I've head this before when moving some boxes in that bedroom in the evening and then a couple of times when I've taken a bath in the evening. I even thought it was some weird plumbing problem, but I'm thinking now that the downstairs lady might be doing it if she hears any noise. We only met her once briefly when we first moved in.
Anyway, might need to go knock on the door tomorrow to see if she's hammering or what. I'm thinking if this place is that bad with the insulation, then that seems uninhabitable.
Btw, this is supposedly one of the "nicer"apartments in this smallish town and also more expensive! I'm thinking if she's bothered by a kitten, she's going to just love it when my hyper active grandchildren come to stay on the weekend!
Have some consideration for the people below you, but you are allowed to live your life in a normal manner. As long as the landlord knows about the kitten and gave you permission in writing to have a cat in your apartment, the kitten can run around and play. But not scream and yowl, so get the little guy neutered at the first reasonable time.
And yes, they can hear the cat downstairs. Which is obvious because they responded to the noise of the kitten.
I suggest that your hyperactive grandkids learn to use their indoor voice and that they are not allowed to run and jump off the furniture while they are at grandparent's house. Take them to the park and let them run off steam. Have them wear soft slippers in the house. But other than trying to soften the noise, you are allowed to have children in your apartment and the kids are allowed to make normal indoor kid noise.
During our short stint as apartment dwellers, we never heard our upstairs neighbor, ever. But she had two little Shih-szu dogs who, like clockwork, jumped off the couch about 3 p.m. and ran around the living room for about 45 seconds. We sure could hear them.
When we moved into apt after having our own home for Decades! The upstairs neighbor had a cat until I found out the noises, I was hearing at Nite Was a Cat running jumping around. After I was told I slept fine. BTW there were 3 adults living upstairs & 2 Gkids that Gma babysat & I never heard a thing! IF I did, I guessing I tuned them out!
So yes, talk to her about the noises... once she knows what the noise is hopefully, she too will tune it out.
I remember one aunt who lived in an apartment telling another aunt that lived downstairs in another building "I wouldn't want to look out the window and just see feet" This was in the 70's.
I have lived in about a dozen different apartments in the past 45 years. In many cases, there was another apartment above me, and in some locations it was pretty aggravating.
I had an apartment in Tucson a few years ago billed as a "luxury" unit, but the bulldog in the unit above sounded like a bowling ball on the floor when he ran around. The side walls had fairly good sound insulation, but the floor between ground floor and upper floor had next to no insulation that I could tell. My most recent apartment in Tucson was even worse, every step taken by the resident above could be heard, and he did not wear shoes in the apartment! My opinion of most of the wood frame apartment buildings in the western part of the USA is they are built cheap with lousy insulation (against both sound and temperature).
I had better luck living in an apartment on the east coast in New Jersey. It was an all masonry building with concrete floors between lower and upper floors, and I had the upper floor on an end unit, and it was dead quiet.
Here in Germany, I found a quiet oasis of an apartment in a 40 unit concrete building built in 1961 and remodeled with heavy outer insulation in the late 1990s. I'm on the second level of a four level walk up building with 8 units in each 4-story section with stairwell. There is additional insulation in the ceiling and side facing walls of each apartment, and nobody wears shoes in their apartments here - house slippers or sandals are the rule. I hear zero noise from the apartment above, below or on either side. There is also no street in front or behind the building, it is all green open space so that makes for a quiet setting. A narrow, low-traffic street is almost 200 feet to the side of my front entrance.
Yes, in some units, even high end units, the insulation between floors is almost nonexistent
. My daughter lived in a high end unit in Orlando and you could hear the 15 pound dog upstairs walking across the floor, you could hear the tags jiggle, and you heard every time he jumped off a bed or piece of furniture. Not to mention, you heard the toilet flush, you heard the shower, you heard the washing machine…
A lot of these buildings were built during the housing boom… And it was not a matter of building quality but building quantity.
Unfortunately, not much your neighbor can do about the cat noise… Unless you have an unauthorized pet in your unit. It’s not like you can cut the legs off the cat and expect them to slither across the floor.
You have a right to live in your unit. You have a right to walk around at any time of the day or night, you have a right to flush your toilet, take a shower, etc.… Now if your neighbor continues to bang on the ceiling, then that’s an issue, and you address that with the landlord or talk to the neighbor and see what exactly it is that she’s hearing… And if you don’t get anywhere with her then consult your landlord.
Tiny paws on a carpet pouncing or running like a kitten ought to be a muffled soft sound especially a little one.
They probably can hear it, but to them, even if its a nice soft sound, its annoying to them. Whether they are too sensitive or not, they are having issues.
If your noise is reasonable apartment living noise and not after 10:00 at night or too early in the morning, i think you are allowed some random reasonable noise.
That sound would not bother me, but there are people with low tolerances for noises. You have a carpet so that helps. if you had bare floors, that would be louder.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
