Husband working from home is noisy

[ForRealMember]

My lovely husband works time in a very full on job - full of stress. I work part time and look after the house, kids etc..The only problem is that on the two days I am at home my husband is at home. I am quite noise intolerant and he is in back to back teams calls and whilst he tries to be quiet I can hear him through noise cancelling headphones. It drives me crazy. It is both of our homes but I can't work out if I am being unreasonable.

It’s a bit depressing though. No separation between work & home. I can see the benefits but I think it’s unhealthy to mix the two. It sounds like OPs husband chooses those days specifically to wfh. So he presumably is able to use an office space.

Does DH go into the office on his other days? It sounds like he wants you all to be tiptoeing around him. Can you make an office space elsewhere?

I’m in the same boat, my company has downsized its office footprint, so it’s simply not possible to have all back in the office at the same time , so WFH is a necessity sometimes,
and in reality most companies will have to offer some kind of hybrid working ( where possible) in the future as so many people now like the balance and flexibility and simply don’t want that 5 day a week commute

Indeed! I believe it's a home and wfh changes the boundaries. 21st century issue I know, gone are the days we all just actually went OUT to work. Well I still do and as much as I would like to wfh, I also think it would be like a bubble with limited reality of the world. Xxx

No, when I'm working he can be flexible wfh do do school runs so stays at home. He doesn't need to go to his office and he has one nearby just for him, so electricity and gas paid for, but prefers to be a pita. Xxx

Yes you are being unreasonable. You are not working that day so if it’s an issue go out-or buy him some headphones. He works hard at a stressful job which allows you to work part time then increase your hours to get you out the house or suck it up

Doesn’t he wear headphones himself? Do you hear the whole meeting on speaker?

He needs to get himself in a room and shut the door. It's your home.

get stuffed! its his house too

Who are you addressing that to? Are you saying that it's OK for him to dominate his entire family's home life with his work? Is it really necessary to be so rude about defending your belief?

There’s a lot of people here saying the husband is working hard allowing the op the supposed luxury of working ‘part time’ but no-one has picked up on the fact that by working part time, looking after the children, the house, and no doubt everything else that has to be done, that the op is allowing the husband the time, flexibility and opportunity to have a stressful, presumably well-paid job. The husband is negatively affecting his wife and presumably knows she suffers from this and yet he carries on because, apparently, according to over half of the voters here, his needs, are more important than the op’s? It’s his job so suck it up? This behaviour wouldn’t wash in the workplace so why is it ok in the home? The selfishness astounds me. The op’s husband isn’t a team player.

It’s interesting the different experiences. Dh wfh all but 1-2 days per month. I wfh 2-3 days a week with flexibility. Currently I’m working in the study because I have lots of calls and big project deadlines so I can shut myself away in there and it doesn’t impact the rest of the house, even though I never wear headphones at home. Dh has far less meetings at the moment so he works at the dining table. this leaves the living room free for dc who can shut the door and noise doesn’t seem to carry. (Dc are teens). If I have a day’s leave and dh is wfh he’d go in the study and I wouldn’t hear him until lunch time.

I think I had a random day’s leave and was blobbing in the living room and dh came in to work (and keep me company apparently). I think my face told him that’s not what I had in mind and he retreated 😂

the op is allowing the husband the time, flexibility and opportunity to have a stressful, presumably well-paid job

yes, because paying the bills is a luxury for you? 😂

Working PT is the luxury. Nothing negative about it, but if it's not of someone's liking, there's always the option of finding a full-time job. It's not a choice for most people, who need a full-time salary - and often it's not even enough.

It's not about the husband's needs, it's about what is necessary for the partner who is the main earner, male or female is irrelevant, and their right to be in their own home, as much as the other partner!

If he was in a shared office space, he couldn’t be barking away at full volume on Teams calls. We all have an indoor voice! Does he have a headset with a mic? He needs to learn to moderate (modulate?) Could you record him at home to demonstrate how intrusive it is?

If the op didn’t work part time, look after the house, and the children, the husband wouldn’t be able to keep his job or his lifestyle the way he had it. His options if he wanted to carry on working, but the op worked full time, would be to pay a nanny, cleaner, cook, or pay for wraparound care for his children all the hours he was at work. Or he could reduce his hours so to accommodate the school run etc. His name may be on the bigger pay check but there’s no way he could currently attain this without op’s assistance. So no, in a partnership, like this, with children, a house, bills, everything, it’s only achieved by the input of them both. So the set up needs to suit them both. Not just the one who gets the bigger pay check.

I feel your pain, OP! My husband also insists on working from home a lot, even though his company's policy is that they prefer people to go into the office. As a manager he should be setting an example to other employees by going to the office, and he only has a 15 minute drive to get to work - but he prefers to work from home so he can have an extra 15 minutes in bed, and doesn't need to bother having a shower. He works in our conservatory, where he sits having very loud Teams meetings all day. He has a booming voice which carries all around the house and garden so there's no getting away from it. He won't wear headphones even though I've asked him to repeatedly, so I have to hear the boring voices of all his colleagues as well.

Meanwhile, I have to tiptoe around trying not to make a noise, and I can't listen to music unless I wear headphones, which isn't always practical when I'm doing stuff around the house. I feel like I'm being watched in the garden as the camera on his computer points that way, and he often forgets to put his Teams background on, so all his colleagues can see me through the conservatory window. They can also see our washing line, so I have to remember to peg my undies on the bit of the washing line that they can't see! The conservatory joins onto our kitchen, and when I'm cooking in there I have to keep the door and window closed so I don't disturb him with the sound of clattering saucepans etc. It gets very hot with the oven on, and with the door and window closed I have no ventilation, so sometimes I almost pass out with the heat!

I finally reached the end of my tether yesterday after 8 solid hours of very loud meetings, and told him I feel like I'm living in a bloody conference room, and I wish he'd go into the office. He can't see my problem at all and thinks I'm being very unreasonable, and has been sulking ever since. AAAGHH!!

Teams is excellent at filtering out background noise. This week alone we've had a fire alarm go off, DH running a shower in the room next door and he needed to unpack some glass beer bottles which clanked really loudly and my team didn't hear a thing. This isn't using any additional feature - it's inbuilt in Teams.

Time for your husbands to start being more considerate and some of you to be more assertive.

That would drive me crackers especially if he didn’t have to work from home.

I’d have seriously had Big Talks by now. It’s not fair, it’s not sustainable and it’s not practical.

@IUsedToBe Don’t give in to the sulking! Stand firm in the face of his unreasonableness.

That sounds awful & it’s like he has completely taken over at home. Do you not have an office space he can use? I think a 15 min commute is fine. He clearly puts his own needs first. I don’t think I could cope with that. At least OPs husband is in another room.

My husband is the same. When we moved into this house we knocked a shed down and built an office pod on it. I can still hear him sometimes when the windows on it are open but it's not bad enough to disturb me. However I also work from home but I am rarely on calls so I work in the house on the opposite side to the garden. Not a cheap choice to do but it's a great space for DH to hide out in for work and any hobbies that he does on the computer on an evening when the kids are in bed.

When I started work, we still used actual phones with handsets. I was one of the first in my office to get a headset, bit like a call centre headset, because I liked to be hands-free while on the phone. It took a colleague taking me aside to politely point out that I was much louder with my headset on because both my ears were covered and I didn’t realise how loud I was being. It was fairly easy once I realised to dial down the volume a little bit and not disturb all of my colleagues, because I’m not a knob.

When we all started working from home at the start of the pandemic, my then employer pointed out to all of us that we were working at home, not living in the office. And that our families shouldn’t feel that they couldn’t live their normal lives.

When my husband works from home, I live my normal life. Just within the boundaries of normal behaviour. So no raves, but I wouldn’t hesitate to Hoover. Equally, he is conscious that he has a loud voice and tries to tone it down. It’s the same for when I’m working at home. I wouldn’t stand for tiptoeing around while another person chose to work from home. And there’s no way I would stay out of rooms in my own home or stay perfectly silent to facilitate another member of the family working, it’s my home too.

If you can't find a solution at home, he has to go to the office. I swear this scenario might have ended my marriage if my DH hadn't gone back to the office. It doesn't help that he has ADHD and no volume control. It was driving everyone nuts. It's a home, not a workplace.

This would really annoy me - I would say that while you appreciate he loves working from home, it’s not an office and you shouldn’t have to spend all day listening to his teams calls.

And when you've tried all the things and he can't stop shouting? No-one else could do anything for the noise and if my DH had this attitude, I'd have taken myself out alright - to an entirely different house and home where he didn't live, so he could shout for hours every day without it bothering anyone. I'd have taken all the kids with me too because they were struggling with it too.

If he wants to work at home he needs to find a solution (I'm out of them) but it's probably going to involve putting an office in the garden somewhere.