Do It Ourselves

[ailbhe]

The most difficult part of DIY for us is the timing. We got it wrong twice - once in July 2008 and once in September 2009, IIRC - and had people bothered by the noise. I hate this, it makes me feel sick to my stomach. So now we plan things carefully; if we can't get them done between 10:30 and 18:30 on a weekday we ask neighbours when is convenient at a weekend.

Tonight we had to hammer the veneer back of a wardrobe into chipboard, so we assembled it with lightning speed and started hammering just after 6pm. It was fine.

But sometimes we have to ask the 7 independent occupants living either side of us when at a weekend will suit them. One woman gets up early on a Saturday and goes out so she'd like us finished by noon on Saturdays and not to do it on Sundays. Far more people lie in at weekends but then go out in the afternoons. What works best is the weekends when the people living on one side are all away and the people living on the other side all sleep late and then go out shopping.

But it doesn't happen very much.

Of course, ideally, we'd have enough money to get it done during normal working hours, when this is the only occupied house and so it's fair game to cut off the water, the electricity, the gas, or the peace-and-quiet while people hired to work in neighbouring houses get things done.

Still, we managed it tonight.

Someone next door is watching something with a lot of revving cars in it.

Comments

[clare-s.livejournal.com]

I think you are being more than reasonable about this. I would generally accept that DIY noises happen on anyday from about 9 or 10am and may go on until the early evenin. I would only get annoyed by it, if it were every weekend. I do think asking someone to limit themselves to only a Saturday morning to get jobs done is a bit OTT.

[ailbhe]

Oh, she doesn't insist or anything - it's her preference, and we do sometimes knock on her door and say "We want to do 20 minutes' drilling" or whatever, and she will say either "That's ok," or "Please wait until the end of this TV thing," but I really hate knowing that I'm making the neighbours miserable.

[buzzy-bee.livejournal.com]

I think that whilst there is such a thing as a right to quiet enjoyment of one's home there is a corresponding right to noisy enjoyment, in respect of DIY, as well. Occasional DIY between 9am and, say, 7pm is completely acceptable and should not require any advance negotiation etc.

[k425.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I fully expect DIY to take place between 9am and 8pm all week. When YB was tiny I wanted to nap in the afternoons with him, but was doomed because one neighbour was replacing his flooring, piecemeal, after his shift. These days, when so many people work, I think weekends are the only time they have for DIY, so it's fair game.

[ailbhe]

That's *exactly* the sort of thing that makes me want to check! It was awful when we had two nurses working different shifts in one house next door; I felt so sad when the children were shrieking in the garden, which is actually normal middle-of-the-weekday noise *really*, but I *knew* someone was trying to sleep!

I can also remember being home sick with a migraine once, in London, and the neighbour above playing and dancing to some sort of WWII Wartime Favourites album in her living room, above my bedroom.

[k425.livejournal.com]

But what if he'd asked? I'd've said we wanted to sleep in the afternoons and then when would he have done his DIY? If it had been an issue I could have gone next door but reasonably, doing DIY during the hours of daylight isn't something to complain about. As for shift-working, I grew to love my ear-plugs!

[ailbhe]

We're, ah, not really occasional, I think. That is, when we do it, it's every weekend for three weeks in a row, or something - we go through phases.

I think this is linked to poverty-shame, which is a bit daft.

[buzzy-bee.livejournal.com]

That's nothing - we did DIY for weeks and weeks on end, often in the evenings, when we first got our house.

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

I agree. I think that when people get most upset it's either because they don't know when it's going to stop (and so are imagining it going on, and on, and on) or it happens to coincide with an unusually bad time for them.

I think it would be reasonable to drop a note round saying what you're going to do and when you'll stop (so they know it's not someone knocking the house down and that it will stop soon). That would reassure people and also mean that they can come and knock on your door if they have a particular problem with the timing that day, while filtering out the various competing minor preferences.

[(Anonymous)]

It sounds like you're a fantastically considerate neighbour, having experienced the shame of a neighbour knocking on my door to ask me to keep the noise of my daily tasks down, I completely understand how awful it is to feel like one's actions are making others miserable.

That said, I've lived in a lot of shared housing situations, and I think that during the day it's simply a fact of life that there will be occasional noise. 10 or 20 minutes of hammering between 10 am and 6 pm shouldn't require individual notice to all the neighbours, or holding off until you find a time when no one at all will be bothered; that's perfectly reasonable. I do agree with the comment that a note, if you're going to be doing a longer project, would be very considerate and certainly appreciated, but I don't think it's necessary to go further than that.