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Comment by wozniacki | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes the "noise" is not heard but felt due to poor dampening of the structures and inferior - if any in the first place - sound proofing.

You feel the sharp slamming of the doors, stairway exits and other household "noise" - as the tremors travel along the length and breadth of the structure - all the way in your living quarters.

With audible noise you can atleast wear earplugs / use noise cancelling devices. With those tremors theres no escaping them. You feel your walls and floors tremble and its a great nuisance.

I can't believe there are no laws on the books that require builders to use vibration-dampening, sound-proofing materials / buffers for even newly constructed apartment buildings !!

I mean none of this is exactly new. Noisome and insensitive neighbors are dime a dozen.

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> You feel the sharp slamming of the doors, stairway exits and other household "noise" - as the tremors travel along the length and breadth of the structure - all the way in your living quarters.

For the love of Flying Spaghetti Monster so much this. So far as I can tell, my neighbors barely make an audible sound. But the continual slamming doors, closing drawers, heavy walking, rolling of chairs, clomping up and down the building stairs...all of it comes straight into my unit and reverberates like the lowest string of a bass guitar and sets me on edge.

I'm slowly getting used to it--mostly by telling myself that they can't hear what they're doing, they're not doing it intentionally, and I'm sure I make the same sounds--but it's super hard because it's very distracting to me.

I've been in numerous poorly built apartments and the only effective way I ever found to mask doors/cabinets slamming, footsteps etc. was with a portable hose AC unit. The compressor was loud and generated a nice masking low frequency tone making it harder to hear that nonsense. It took a week to adjust to the sound, but after that it was quite soothing. Of course this isn't actually solving anything, it's just driving up the noise floor for low frequency and contributing to making everything louder.

Unfortunately they're heavy, woefully inefficient, and quite expensive to run.

I later moved into a newly built "luxury" apartment where the neighbors garage was directly under my bedroom. I figured as long as I got a decent neighbor it wouldn't be too bad. Struck out and got someone underemployed driving a 2 fast 2 furious civic with custom exhaust. Shook the entire building every night between 12 and 4 AM. No way to mask that. Lesson learned.

Top floor always, corner if you can, never directly above or next to a garage. Only exception is if the building is made out of concrete, which is exceptionally rare and will cost more. More expensive place the better -- you have a (slightly) higher chance of getting next to working professionals and quiet families.

I'm in a similar situation, the parking garage for my block of apartments is rigght under my bedroom. It's not too bad, except for one neighbour's motorcycle, where he is obviously using a modified exhaust to be louder. In the winter he likes to leave the engine to warm up for about 5 minutes every morning at 7am...

if you care, you might talk to building management about this. I also live in a building with a garage and there is a very strict "no idling" rule. it's bad to have unnecessary CO emissions in a somewhat enclosed area in the first place, but it can also set off the detector and then everyone has to evacuate the building.

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