Our neighbour (in the flat below) has asked we stop talking at 9:45pm at night?

[DoingTheMumThing101]

We live in a shared townhouse and the couple downstairs have asked that my partner & I stop talking at 9:45 pm in the evening because they can hear us? We have only been living here for 1 week and get the kids to bed early, we are then woken up by them below speaking at 6am. AIBU?

Ask that they stop breathing, drinking water and using their toilets. Also, ask them to please only enter their house at 11:54 am via Tardis.

L.o.l🤣 just tell them we can also hear you at 6 am in the early hours of the morning too,

So no its not reasonably to expect yourselves to be ever so quite

Play Bjork famous song. It's so quiet on every so often ...

@Fraaahnces

🤣😂🤣
L.o l 👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿

@DoingTheMumThing101 what do they expect people talk 👄

If they don't like it
Why dont they go and live next door to a church's graveyard or off grid back of beyond out of the sticks 🙄 etc.

Do you live in Privet Drive?

have screech owls that get going about 3am. I feel your pain. I'd much rather hear people talking.

Get a recording of the little buggers and report them to the noise nuisance service. This would not happen with Swiss or German owls. They only screech just once between 8 am - 8.05 am and even then only in a whisper.

I can imagine that there will be a lot of noise issues as it’s pretty much like someone is upstairs (or downstairs) in your house. But it’s unreasonable to ask you to stop talking at 9.45pm. Perhaps ask if they’d stop getting up at 6am or ask they get ready for work in silence! Sounds like you will have noise issues but report to landlord and encourage them to do the same as perhaps some sound proofing could be installed.

But OP then says she's woken up at 6am by them talking every day? Their request is unreasonable but apparently the noise sensitivity goes both ways

They are being ridiculous, when living in your type of property, a flat or semi detached you need to accept there will be slight noises every now and then. Keep talking xx

Sound proofing.
Can you ask landlord?
carpets with underlay will help both of you
maybe they'll agree to share cost for insulation between floorboards?

What? That is crazy. I'd carry on as normal and look into sound proofing, perhaps you could split the cost with them? Talk to them, tell them it's not normal for the noise to carry like that, because you can hear them at 6am too.

If you can hear your neighbours talking you either need to get sound proofing or move. I could ot stand living like that. Iive in a 1980s terraced house and can't hear anything either side. Not hoovering, the TV, nothing. Id go insane if I could hear people talking.

OP you're being lazy.. look for solutions not objections to their entirely reasonable request..

I belive there are on line sign language courses. An interim solution may be to play music so loud they can't hear you speaking

I still have nightmares about people living below me in a flat who asked if I could stay elsewhere at weekends and change my working hours from 9-5 to fit in with their night shifts. They made same unreasonable request to people below them as well. Batshit. I was selling anyway and was glad to get hell out of there.

I think you should stop talking at 9.45 and start having loud, performative sex at 9.50, OP.

This takes me back to a ground floor flat we had many years ago - the neighbor upstairs had come to complain about the noise of the bathroom door slamming in the first week. It was a rental flat, and the door had a spring closure mechanism which meant it closed with force, so we as reasonable people said we would disable the spring mechanism (restoring it when we left the flat) and thought it was all good. Apparently he returned complaining about our general living noise several times but always got DH who would calmly listen and then say - well, we will do our best to minimize noise but we also have the right to live here too, and shut the door on him. We were a fairly quiet couple and the things he was complaining of were the noise of the extractor fan in the windowless bathroom (couldn't be decoupled from the light switch) and the washing machine being used during the day.
He was a bit of an odd duck, our neighbor, sort of bearded hipster type before it was ironic, and had lots of political posters up in his windows - at this time there was much discussion of national identity cards being brought in, the Identity cards act had just passed and he was campaigning against so lots of ' no to state surveillance' type posters'

And then one day he came down to complain again, and he got me out of bed at 7am. I was on my maternity leave, fucking exhausted 38 weeks pregnant with a nearly 9lb baby kicking at my bladder, impossible to get comfy because of SPD, waddling round like a miserable goose with indigestion and carpal tunnel syndrome. He rapped on our door and when I eventually got there started straight in shouting at me that we had used our bathroom 9 times overnight (because he could hear the fan and lightswitch turn on) and this was absolutely unreasonable and did we have incontinence problems?
Unlike my calm and peaceable DH, I went pregnant psycho ballistic on him, not swearing but basically cold, angry scorn - that yes, it was sort of a medical issue and what sort of freak keeps tabs on his neighbors bathroom visits anyway? Pointed out that his great concerns for ID cards and civil liberties were just so much bullshit when he was acting like the toilet stasi and that instead of coming down ranting at me with ridiculous demands not to use my bathroom he could focus his energy on sound proofing/insulation in his own flat, as we had a right to use our bathroom and while we had altered the door, the fan/light set up in the flat was unlikely to change during our or any other tenancy.
He started angry but shrivelled like a balloon deflating - he hadn't thought to be met with any opposition, so scuttled off apologetically and after that avoided us (well, me) He got new carpets delivered a week later and we never heard a word about new baby noise.

As long as you are only making reasonable living your lives kinds of noises, crack on and ignore the neighbours.

This kind of request is the thin end of the wedge and will turn into all kinds of others batshit demands to soften their experience of living in a downstairs flat. Been there, done that. I once had a neighbour who complained about the noise of a cat flap. Be firm from the beginning, it's the only way.

😂

Pointed out that his great concerns for ID cards and civil liberties were just so much bullshit when he was acting like the toilet stasi

You absolute star!

“Fine but you can’t start speaking till 9am”

bet they won’t like that

No dropping things? They would have been shit out of luck if I'd lived above them!

I'm wildly dyspraxic and there isn't a thing in my house that hasn't been accidentally dropped, kicked over, or slapped to the floor as I've tried to grab it😂

That's what I was thinking, if it's a shared house (townhouse) a chat is what's needed.

Back in my days of sharing a shared townhouse it was good in some ways but not so good when one of the housemates had the loud washing machine and tumble drier going albeit in the kitchen downstairs at the bottom of the house at gone midnight and the noise carried through the house!

Agree with others, most normal noise is just that, normal noise.

When I moved out of my parents home years ago I slept through anything (nothing would wake me) but their home is in a vale area (at bottom of 2 steep hills going upwards and downwards in either direction and it's deathly quiet there. I thought I'd have to get used to other noises but actually was ok.

Some people I've known have loved living near busy roads with traffic, never hear it, and if they move somewhere really quiet, struggle to adjust. Same with houses/flats.

These idiots will just have to get used to you.

I really would just ignore them. It's not like you have a barking dog, techno bass loud music or wild parties happening every night. Now those, I would be a bit narked at.

Say that you will try speaking more quietly after 9:45pm when you are home alone but not when you have guests over.
Also ask whether they, in turn, would mind not speaking until after 7:15 am work days and after 8:00 am on the weekends.

I absolutely love this https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cqf4rweyD0k/
I'm in Paris where everyone lives in a flat so it's just par for the course really. The red flag for me is that they've been straight up complain within the first week of your moving in - drawing a line in the sand as it were. Best advice here is to try and be on friendly terms with your neighbours because if you like each other you'll generally be more considerate to each other. Some people are just not suited to apartment living.