It’s never fun living near loud neighbors, whether they’re next door to you, or live above or below you. The lucky ones haven’t had to deal with this before, but it seems to be especially common for anyone living in apartments, condos or townhouses. Don’t think it can’t happen when you live in a house though, it just doesn’t seem to happen as often when you have 10-20 feet of separation between houses as opposed to just a wall or floor in other housing types.
Related: Soundproof Existing Windows
Dealing with Loud Neighbors
When I lived in my first apartment, we had the loudest possible neighbors. It was almost as if they had their speakers right up against the shared bedroom wall, blaring music at all hours of the day and night. If they weren’t playing music, they were playing video games with the volume all the way up, and screaming at the TV when something went wrong.
Living near loud neighbors can make it hard to sleep, hard to concentrate, and can even wear on your mental well-being. So what can you actually do about noisy neighbors? Confrontation is always an option, but the loud neighbors I’ve dealt with in the past didn’t seem to be swayed by it, and not everyone is confrontational.
File a Noise Complaint
The first thing you should try is filing a formal complaint either through your communities’ front office, or with the authorities. So, instead of you being the one to confront your loud neighbors, someone else can do it on your behalf. This should be your first course of action because it does work sometimes, and it’s tone option that doesn’t require spending money. This may also be one of the only options when living in an apartment or rental property, since you may be limited to how much construction you could do for you shared walls or floors.
If the noisy neighbors ignore the consequences from the noise complaint (can include fines or even eviction), then you may need to get ready to start a home soundproofing project.
Soundproof Your Fence
If you live in a house and have a fence between your properties that’s at least 6 feet tall, then you could have some luck creating a soundproofing fence. Creating a soundproof fence is somewhat of an investment, but only for the materials, installation is usually fairly easy.
Fence Blokker is a Reinforced Mass Loaded Vinyl, meant to be hung on a fence outside to block a variety of sounds including traffic, music, talking and even industrial noise. As long as the Fence Blokker is installed taller than the line of sight of the noise source, the material will significantly reduce noise form your noisy neighbors, this is why the fence should be 6 feet tall or taller.
In order to install Fence Blokker you really just need the material and zip ties for a chain link fence, or hooks for wood and vinyl fences. If selected, the material comes grommeted along the top edge, making installation a breeze. The material does weigh 1 lb/sf though, so installation may require 2 people, as a 4.5’x6′ panels will be 27 lbs.
Soundproof Your Windows
If your fence is not tall enough to accommodate soundproofing material, you may need to turn to soundproofing the windows. Soundproof curtains can reduce up to 80% of the noise coming into your house through the windows. Glass has a much lower soundproofing rating than the walls in your house, so it is very likely that the windows are the weak spots allowing sound to leak in from your loud neighbors.
Soundproof curtains will have an STC rating, which is a rating typically used by architects to show much sound a material blocks. They’re typically made with mass loaded vinyl as the core material, and covered in fabric to look just like regular curtains.
In Conclusion : What to Do About Loud Neighbors
You should first file a noise complaint either to the front office of your community or to the authorities. For those who live in houses, you can either construct a soundproof privacy fence or install soundproof curtains on the windows.
