So I'm rather cranky today. Last night at around 9.30, while I was watching CSI in my room I started to hear this low humming noise coming through the wall my bedroom shares with our right-hand neighbors. At first I thought that they must be doing some laundry, yet I'd never heard their washing machine before except for the time last week when it went off balance, but they quickly fixed that. When the noise was still going on at 10.30 when I was reading and getting ready for sleep, I started to get annoyed. At 11pm when I put a pillow over my head, the noise didn't stop, and I realized that it was more of a vibration and that my whole bed (and self) was vibrating. At midnight I went downstairs to sleep on the couch. When my roommate came home a few minutes later, she went up to my room and heard the noise and felt the vibration. Neither of us have any idea what that noise is, but we do know that it's not just a fluke, we officially have noisy neighbors.

They're fairly new to the neighboorhood and they have kids. So we gave them what we felt was an appropriate amount of time to get furniture placement and wall-hangings settled (like 3 or 4 weeks) and even give them a little extra slack because kids are noisy in general. But kids aren't thumping or vibrating at 2am (one would hope).

We wanted to go to the building manager, but from what I've been hearing from people, they think that we should go to the neighbors directly first. This is a terrifying prospect to both of us, as we hate confrontation and have never even met the neighbors in the first place. I can understand, though, how going to them at least once before reporting them is probably a good idea. So what's to be done? What about a letter? Something like this:

Dear Neighbors,

First we’d like to welcome you to the neighborhood. Please let us know if you need anything or need to know where anything around town is.

We’re sure you’ve noticed how thin the walls are. We do our best to keep our noise down, especially after 10 at night. We do have a problem with our washing machine going off balance, but we’ve been in contact with the building office to try to get something done about that, I hope it hasn’t been a problem for you.

We do have a bit of problem. For some reason, at certain times of the night we can hear some very loud thumping and other noises coming from your apartment. We do understand that some of that is simply because we live close together in an apartment complex, but late at night it becomes disruptive to our sleep schedule. Last night one of us had to sleep on the couch because there was a humming noise vibrating through the wall her bedroom shares with your apartment. It began at around 9:30 and she went downstairs to sleep at around midnight, so we’re not sure when it stopped. Perhaps you could move whatever piece of machinery that is away from the wall a bit?

Attached living isn’t easy, that’s for sure! Thanks for your cooperation.

The Girls at Apartment 6

What do you think? Too passive-agressive? It has to stop. It's not fair for me to have to sleep on the couch in my own house, when I have a perfect good bed upstairs. Help.