Living With Noise: There Are Limited Options, or Accept it

By Bill Primavera

Perhaps I’ve always been a bit too sensitive about noise in and around my home environment.

I was first made aware of this when I moved into my first apartment in New York in a brand-new building, where the walls were paper thin and there seemed to be no noise insulation from the apartment above me.

There was a single mother living there with a five- or six-year-old child and between her high heels clicking across the floor and the running around of her child, I was in noise hell.

In those days people were likely to be listed in telephone books. I looked up her name and number and would call whenever the noise from above was too disturbing. I would also complain to management. It became an intense situation and escalated to the point where her boyfriend came pounding on my door one day, threatening to beat me up.

To seek some peace of mind, I had no choice but to move, and this time it was to an apartment where there was no one above me. To this day, when I live in a spanking new condo, that has been my first requirement for a home; that no one live above me.

Most of us who live in Westchester or Putnam counties have some kind of proximity to a neighbor who is subject to noise we make as we share property lines or walls of apartments or condominiums, and that can create problems, sometimes big ones.

When my wife and I married and shared our first apartment in another new building, there was an older gentleman who lived in the apartment right off the lobby who loved to share his life with all the residents of the building. He must have been involved with entertainment in the 1950s, because he would leave his door open and sing songs of that period without accompaniment. Only in New York, right?  His favorite was “A White Sports Coat and a Pink Carnation.”

Whenever my wife and I want to refer to the intrusion of one person’s lifestyle, aka “noise,” into another’s, all we have to do is sing that song as code and it speaks volumes.

When we moved to the country, the vagaries of close proximity were lessened for sensitive ears and far different. Here in the wide-open spaces, we have lawn mowers, leaf blowers and the biggest offender about which most of us complain, barking dogs. That is, if they bark too long unabated.

Most towns have in their codes the acceptable length of time an owner can have a dog bark before a neighbor can ask that a warning be issued by the code enforcement officer.

For those of us who share walls in condos or apartments, we have the same issues that those of us in the city would have. Recently I had a conversation about this subject with a gentleman who lives in a Westchester condo with other retired people sharing walls with his unit.

“I know most things about their lifestyles, like when the nice woman on one side of me can’t sleep and I hear her TV go on in the middle of the night,” he said. “We just adjust.”

And, failing all else, there are always old-fashioned earplugs.

Bill Primavera is a realtor associated with William Raveis Real Estate and founder of Primavera Public Relations, Inc., the longest running public relations agency in Westchester (www.PrimaveraPR.com). His real estate site is www.PrimaveraRealEstate.com. To engage the services of The Home Guru and his team to market your home for sale, call 914-522-2076.

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