To be annoyed with a neighbour who says my dd's alleged stomping in the morning is making her sick?

[pranged]

A new neighbour moved in to a downstairs flat about two weeks ago. Four days in she comes upstairs to say she can hear noises in the morning. I said ok we will try to keep it down. Then we got a letter from the building management saying her landlady has complained. Her email was a list of "transgressions" the tenant started taking 48 hours after moving in! We have since ordered carpets and underlay and are waiting delivery. This evening we got another visit from the tenant who says she is sleep deprived because our dd wakes her up! She is now very sick and dizzy and suggested we 'disciplined' or 'incentivise' our dd to not wake up early. AIBU to now completely lose it? Help. What do I do?
P.s. we have beautiful parquet floor ..... That we are in the process of covering up and we don't wear shoes in the flat.

Different people have different tolerances to noise.

The noise coming from your flat is disturbing this neighbour to the point where she is becoming unwell. You do not know anything about her medical history to suggest this is untrue. 6:30 is very early for some people, and your household may be causing her to lose sleep.

Wooden floors can transmit noise horribly. There was a condition in the lease in a block I lived in which banned them from upper floors (other than kitchens/bathrooms).

So in OP, you've said all this and it does show that you're creating a noise nuisance, a neighbour has complained once and as there has apparently been no improvement has mentioned it again. I am assuming your aim is to be a good neighbour and not stomp all over someone. So you need to tell her when the carpet is due to arrive. And you need to find out what time she gets up, so you can ensure DD is much quieter until that point.

When I unintentionally did this to a downstairs neighbour, I made damn sure that all noise was stopped until well after 7:30 and took flowers as apology.

There is no right to silence! Many flats in the UK are conversions of old houses and they just don't have that great sound insulation. You can complain to environmental health about excessive noise, and the rules are different at night, but the rules are really there for things like playing loud music, operating noisy machinery, huge noisy rows or regularly having parties, not living a normal life.

The definition is "noise emitted from premises so as to be prejudicial to health or a nuisance" and it is generally taken to be for an average person (so if you have some reason to be very sensitive to noise then that doesn't mean the other person is necessarily at fault). We had the environmental health team around once because of loud music, and although they were lovely, they said it wasn't enough of an issue for them to get involved as it was below the decibel limit they used.

When I spoke to environmental health about a very similar matter they told me that if you're being reasonable - ie. don' turn your music up hideously loud, scream / shout, have the tv on loud at all times of the day and night - but just live a normal life, then the fact that the building has poor and isolation and the downstairs is complaining is NOT you causing nuisance.

It's worth ringing Environmental health for a bit of advice. You sound perfectly, in fact more than, reasonable and when you get the full picuture as to the legality of everything you don't feel quite so much like you can be bullied!

Some people are weird when it comes to noise from the neighbours. We had one like this. We tried to reduce the noise to keep her happy but eventually realised that it wasn't less noise she wanted, it was no noise. Ever. She sent her husband round to complain about the dogs barking (the got environmental health involved who told me to ignore them as my dogs were angels but my neighbours were barking); to complain about squeaky dog toys; to complain about my husband starting his car before 7.00 to go to work (apparantly this is really antisocial); he even came round to complaint about my husband shovelling snow off the path too loudly.

YANBU

You're getting carpet installed, you don't wear shoes in the flat, and you've asked your daughter to be as quiet as possible. I really don't see what else you could do.

"She has the right to silence until 7am. Stop being so insensitive and get the carpet down."

She only has the right to silence if she lives in a detached house in the middle of nowhere. Flats have noise from the neighbours, it can't be helped.

As for the carpet, you did read and understand the bit where the OP said "We have since ordered carpets and underlay and are waiting delivery. "

Have yu got carpet or wood flooring this can be the source of untold misery and can sound like wild horses

Mrbojangles - if you read the op it explains about the flooring.

She is renting, if this flat is unsuitable for her, she can move.

I would send a very firm letter to her and the landlady, saying:

• I am in receipt of your letter dated xx and also xx verbal complaints about noise in the flat, which started 48 hours after xxxx moved in.
• To confirm: the essence of the noise complaint is our day-to-day living. Our DD gets up at around 6.30, which is entirely normal for a child of her age. We go to bed at xx. We will encourage our daughter to be quiet but will not, as has been suggested, "discipline" her about waking up at a normal time.
• Our view is that it is in the nature of converted(?) flats to have a degree of noise - that has always been our own attitude when we can hear our neighbours.
• Regardless of this, we are carpeting our floors to make life easier for xxx. We hope this is appreciated as the enormous (and expensive) expression of goodwill that it is.
• The carpeting is due to arrive in xx weeks. Until then, and afterwards, we expect no more complaints about the everyday noise of family life. We have a right to live here and make the reasonable amount of noise any family would make - walking up and down, talking to each other, watching the TV at what I assure you is a reasonable level. If there are any further issues I would suggest the next step would be for the landlady to noise insulate the ceiling. We would point out to the landlady we we're on good terms with her former tenants.

Although she sounds unreasonable and I feel bad for you - I have to speak from the other side of the coin.

I have lived in a ground floor flat, many moons ago, and footfall from the tenants above was so intrusive and upsetting we moved out in the end after a miserable two years - it really, really ground us down.

You'd be amazed how much noise just normal foot steps make from below. I appreciate you have tried to do all you can, I'm just say the noise can turn you really quite unreasonable!

I'm amazed at the fabulous 'rights' people have! I worked in noise pollution for eight years, and I've never hard of any of these laws or rights! We had no end of trouble with wooden floors in upper flats, but we couldn't force people to put carpets down.

If noise is generated as a result of normal household activity (I.e. Walking around and living a normal life) rather than sheer inconsideration, malice, or any other 'reason'. People do have a right to live their lives too.

Often we had cases of basically, intolerance, people moving above a takeaway and not expecting to smell food till 11pm, or complete silence from the pub next door. Flats complaining about each other was par for the course. We would have families complaining about the 'smell' from the family next door, who culturally ate a lot of curries, or, when Ramadan was in the summer months and even the children had to rise before dawn, for food and prayers.

Its impossible to set standards as they are so variable, depending on the entire picture. The measure we used was that of a 'reasonable person' and within Environmental Health we were judged to be 'reasonable'.

In this case I would say (based entirely on the OPs info) that installing properly insulated carpets was a more than reasonable step to help her new neighbour. However, its unlikely to solve the problem entirely and mediation might be a more suitable intervention in this case.

What time would she prefer your dd woke up at?!

OP you have my sympathies. But I'm afraid I think there is nothing you can do which will satisfy this lady. Just accept she doesn't like living below you and ignore, ignore, ignore.

And hope she moves again.

Soupdragon, you wouldn't believe the complaints we got from people living in detached, isolated country houses, fertiliser on the fields, cockerels crowing at dawn, cows and sheep coming down from the fields, dogs barking, festivals in nearby farmers fields, noise from intensive farming facilities, fireworks at wedding venues, seriously!

There was a funny news story near me a couple of years ago. A young couple moved to a local village, several houses away from the village church.

They tried - and failed - to get the bell ringing banned!

Thanks for the comments, suggestions and ideas. I am just about to go and get some ear plugs for her as a standby until the massive carpets arrive. I do sympathise because the previous person sounds like she has something my mother had. But I AM doing something. I cannot hurry a delivery short of driving the John Lewis van myself! That is why it is so frustrating. BTW We had rugs over the parquet floor, wasn't like I left it totally bare and the previous people did not complain. Do I have to redecorate everytime someone new moves in?

And another BTW thanks for letting me know I am not completely insane.

Ferret - that has happened again not far from us. The council have actually served a noise abatement order to stop the church clock chiming at night following a complaint from someone who moved into a house by the church!

OP - you have taken all reasonable steps. I would suggest responding along the lines Josie suggests. If the complaints keep coming after the carpet goes down then you could also throw the ball back into their court by putting a couple of questions in a letter:

Since I am sure you agree that punishing a young child for waking up at a perfectly normal hour of the morning is not an option, we would be open to any other suggestions xxx has as to how the noise should be reduced.

There really won't be any proposals she can make without making herself look hugely unreasonable - unless she is going to suggest that your daughter shouldn't be allowed to move around in her own home at all, or that you should all get up later and be late for work.

Environmental health really won't be interested unless the noise is truly excessive and it doesn't sound as though it is. If she keeps going with the complaints then there may come a time when you can actually take action against her for harassment.

Anitablake I laughed at the rules people make up and then quote as law. Its why I read threads like this, to see what new legislation has been invented.

I didn't think that noise from children playing constituted a legal statutory nuisance? So surely environmental health wouldn't intervene.

We've had problems with our neighbours, so been looking into it quite a bit. They are old and deaf and we've had the tv blaring out every evening, they think because he is deaf, he has the right to have it blaring out. The council installed noise monitoring equipment and have said it constitutes a statutory nuisance.

I think if you've done the carpets, you are being reasonable and she CANNOT tell you how to parent your child.

We have upstairs neighbours, who I strongly suspect have wooden/laminate floors as when things are dropped the noise is horrendous. Their children run around screaching when I am trying to go to sleep, the man pays the guitar and sings badly loudly for hours on end. Honestly it makes me hate them and at times it does make me start to feel ill.

I would never start complaining to them though and smile and say hi through gritted teeth. I think buying the carpet is a really big gesture and you must be really trying to be nice neighbours

I don't think 6.30 is an unreasonable time to get up, but then perhaps I am weird? If we don't get up for 6.30 we are lucky to get anywhere on time, school/nursery drop off and getting to work for 8.30? 6.30 when you don't have other responsibilities might be early but it has been a long time since I was able to get up 10 mins before I left for work!

YANBU.

Your daughter has the right to walk around her own home whenever the hell she wants and, so long as she is banging on pans or similar, then your neighbour will have to suck it up as part of living in a flat.

I think you are being very considerate to put down carpet. If that's not good enough then she may have to drop her ceiling and soundproof from her side. The solution isn't for your daughter to tip-toe around her own home like a pantomime burglar!

6.30 isn't early to get up - my dh leaves for work at 6.15 so I'm not sure how he would be expected to get ready if he had to be silent before 7am. How would people who work shifts ever get anything done?

What a horrible situation & it sounds as if you are doing all you can.

You say that you can hear rhe people above you-who get up at the same time.

How do you think that you sound if you were trying to sleep?