The Letter

After finding out last night I have not in fact had insomnia waking me up for the past 4-6 months, it is just the incredibly loud neighbors upstairs that had been waking me every night, I wrote the following letter and called the landlord. Hope it all pans out. Can you believe I had to call them at 2:40 AM this morning? I can't EVEN tell you how upset I was waking up at 12:15 AM, 1:30 AM and then the icing on the cake 2:40 AM to loud banging and furniture moving.

July 20, 2009

XXXXXXX and Roommates
XXXXXXXXX Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

Dear XXXXXX and Roommates at XXXXXXXX,

We have been neighbors for a few years now and feel that we have been very patient with the moving in and out of roommates and the noise level coming from your flat but feel at this time we need to make some suggestions for noise reduction. We have spoken to you about wearing shoes in your apartment and thank you for keeping that to a minimum.

We live beneath you and have been in this flat for about 10 years now. We take pride in our home and it is a place we love to come at the end of the day however, the noise pollution has gotten to the point of it interrupting our sleep at night (hence my call to you at 2:40 AM this morning). This has been going on for long before this morning. You must know that we can hear everything that goes on in your flat; conversations, walking around, shoes hitting the floor when removed, your kitchen table and chairs being moved, etc. It is not that we hear the sound; we can also feel it rattle throughout our flat. Your kitchen and dining room (or 3rd bedroom) is above our bedroom and unfortunately that is where the majority of the disturbance is coming from. The rest is from the back bedroom in the north west corner of the house (above our living room).

I have phoned the landlords (XXXX and XXXXX) and they are aware of the suggestions I am making here and I hope we can come to some sort of agreement to make this situation work for all of us.

- After 10 PM please be mindful of the noise level
- When opening and closing basement door do not slam – this is a common stairwell and everything echoes throughout, we believe your trash or recycling is in the stairwell because we often hear things being tossed into a bin (mainly glass jars and/or bottles).
- Please place things on the floor instead of dropping or tossing them
- Addition of felt backings to the bottom of kitchen table and chairs would help tremendously
- Keep in mind, everything that makes a noise on your floor reverberates down into our place

We don’t need an apology; we would just like the problem to be resolved with respect and mindfulness of the issue and appropriate changes made to eliminate the noise pollution so we can all live here and be happy and healthy.
Thank you,

Katie and XXXX XXXXXX

CC: XXXXXXXXXX(landlord)