Their Neighbor Keeps Banging on the Ceiling Over Their Dogs—Now They Don’t Know What to Do
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People living in apartments need to understand that their neighbors will make some noise, but some people just can’t seem to accept that.
What would you do if your downstairs neighbor kept pounding on her ceiling to try to get your dogs to bark (you assume) as well as constantly complained about the noise you made?
That is what the family in this story is dealing with, and they aren’t sure how to respond. They want to be good neighbors, but they also want to be able to live their lives normally.
Personally, I think they need to document what the neighbor is doing and file complaints against her with the landlord to see if it will stop. Read through the full story below and see what you think should happen.
Neighbor banging on our floor…
Hi everyone! My partner and I live above an absolute gem to society of an older woman. She hates us for literally no reason.
Some people are just miserable.
My partner and I have been nothing but nice to her prior to her deciding to hate us, and we have not broken any rules or done anything wrong to warrant the treatment we have gotten from her.
A little bit of backstory. She is an older lady who lives alone and works second shift (we think). Everything started when she had surgery.
Living in a middle unit can be bad when it comes to noise.
Our building has 3 floors: basement level, mid-level, and top-level. We are on the top level, and she is on the middle level. The middle level is about 5ish feet above ground level and has a balcony.
Our building only has 12 apartments in it and is surrounded by grass and is across from the complex dog park. We also have 2 dogs.
As long as they clean up after the dog, it is fine.
The back door of the building is on ground level and has a nice grassy area behind it. I love to take our dogs to the dog park as much as possible, but when the weather is bad, it gets really muddy and floods.
Also, the complex is pet-friendly, so there are others who use the dog park. If the weather is bad or someone is already in the dog park, we take our dogs out the back door, on leash, to use the bathroom.
The smell of smoking can be terrible.
This lady sits on her balcony and smokes, which sucks for us because it wafts right back up and into our windows when we have them open.
So, every time we hear her balcony door open, we have to get up and shut ours, or else our apartment will smell like a bar that allows smoking. It’s bad. I tried to get our leasing manager to do something about that, because there is something in the lease about smoke getting into other units, but whatever.
It will become a problem again in the fall when we want to have our windows open.
Dogs have to go to the bathroom.
Any of our dog waste is immediately cleaned up and disposed of properly. It’s not like we are leaving waste to bake in the 90-degree heat.
This lady was outside smoking one day and decided to have a problem with our dogs using the bathroom in the back area. It’s not like we are letting them use the bathroom on the support poles of her balcony, or on any of her property.
That lady just likes to complain.
She just doesn’t like that she can see them when she looks down from her balcony. We are not the only pet owners who do this in our building and in the entire complex.
I asked her if she could point out in the lease where it specifically states that dogs can’t use the bathroom back there, and she couldn’t, because it doesn’t exist.
Maybe she just hates dogs.
I told her she could contact the leasing manager if she had a problem with us and that the leasing manager was going to tell her the same thing. I let our leasing manager know about this as well.
This woman has yelled at us over the dogs before, makes comments about us when she’s on the phone on her balcony and we are outside that we can hear, heard our dogs playing in the dog park and came out of the building to stare at us, gives us dirty looks everytime she sees us, lied to the leasing manager saying we have 3 dogs to get us in trouble, and has now started randomly banging on the top of her walls or our floor.
Now she is just lying about things.
I have been threatened with a $500 fine for having “3 dogs” because this lady wanted to say that. She has literally seen both of our dogs, and it happened right after we were having a playdate with my partner’s sister’s dogs in the dog park.
We were outside the entire time since it was a nice day, and the complaint came right after that. I offered the leasing manager to view my indoor camera footage whenever she’d like to see that we don’t have 3 dogs living there and told her to ask the maintenance guy who had been in and out plenty of times.
I’m guessing that the neighbor banging on the ceiling is intentional.
On top of this, I usually take the dogs to see my parents almost every weekend, so they are not even there the entire week.
Back to the banging. We are trying to figure out if she’s trying to clean her walls or something, or if it only happens when something happens in our apartment.
Their neighbor just doesn’t want any noise, which is unreasonable.
It literally sounds like she takes the end of a broomstick or something and bangs it against her ceiling, which is our floor.
It’s happened when nobody is moving around; it’s happened when we’ve been walking around (you can hear a lot through the ceiling, but that’s not my fault. The witch said she has lived here for 6 years, so if it bothered her that bad, she could’ve moved to a top unit) and when the dogs are barking.
If the apartment allows dogs, you have to expect to hear an occasional bark.
When no one is home, the dogs have bark collars on. They are a breed of dog bred to bark, and they have plenty of time to be dogs and bark. Or, when someone is home, the barking is immediately stopped by me or my partner.
It’s not like the barking goes on for minutes at a time or hours, and it’s not like they bark all the time. I’ve heard dogs in the building bark for longer than mine. I also have really never heard anything through the wall, so I think the soundproofing is good in the walls.
This would not surprise me at all.
From our past experiences with her, I think she is trying to antagonize my dogs into barking by pounding on her ceiling with whatever it is that she has so she can find something to complain about us for.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all. It’s about 6 or 7 pounds, and then it’ll be done, or it’ll happen again a few minutes later.
She should try to record it and report it to the landlord.
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I’m trying to figure out what she is trying to accomplish with that so I can get ahead of it for when she eventually tries to complain about the dogs.
I’m about to start doing jumping jacks every time I hear it. It literally vibrates our entire floor.
Of course the dog is going to react.
Our younger dog will jump off the bed and furniture, but we’re not on a treadmill or dancing or doing anything that she would hear for a long period of time.
Is there anything that can be done about this?
Whenever you live in an apartment, the best thing that you can do is to document and record every instance and file complaints when appropriate. If you aren’t willing to do that, you just have to live with it.
Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about this awful situation.
I don’t think she will stop smoking, and these people won’t give up their dogs.
Doing what you can to keep the noise down is a good start.
Some people should never live in an apartment.
Documenting the banging is a great first step.
If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a man who stopped salting his neighbors’ driveways when they wouldn’t stop driving through his yard.
This person thinks the dogs are making more noise than they realize.
When living in an apartment, you have to document every issue so you can report it when necessary. The neighbor isn’t going to be happy no matter what, so protecting yourself is the best option here.
If they can put rugs down to keep the dog walking noises to a minimum, that might help as well.
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