alternatively, if you can hook us up with the following:

— scaffolding (ca. 3.5 metres high)
— a funktion one sub
— the handles of any slsk users with an extensive collection of early dubstep tunes in flac format

that would also be appreciated, of course.

thanks to everyone who has made suggestions, we really appreciate your help!

for context, and perhaps your amusement, some background: this is about my partner's apartment. i have my own.

the problem is that even with two of those, we currently get zero quiet evenings.

because i have had another nightmare neighbour downstairs for five and a half years now.

we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and it is driving us insane.

i moved into my current place in late 2020, a particularly difficult time for ... well, everyone, but for me it came with a side of break-up and having to move houses after having lost my job. but i did find my dream flat! 55m², back then for a utopian € 530 and with a view over half of the city because it is located on the 14th floor.

i realised early on that the house, the GDR's last prestige project in east berlin, was not exactly very soundproof.

the reinforced concrete conducts sound all too well: banging doors, stuff being dropped to the floor, etc. the exposed radiator pipes surely don't help either.
but i'm not a noise-sensitive person, per se. and i always have something on—music, or video—which masks the occasional disturbance.

or so i thought.

i had to learn that i was not prepared for my downstairs neighbour and her friends.

those are very loud people, almost always drunk and sometimes, i think, on meth.

for reasons that i still don't understand, i never complained about this for years.

but also, luckily, after a few months—in the spring of 2021—i heard from them less frequently. they had moved outside during the day, staying out late and not throwing many indoor parties at my neighbour's place. but then fall came around, and this got worse again. this became a pattern, but i still kept quiet about it.

i knew that i just had to wait a few months for quieter times, after all.

plus, i was still able to just kind of ignore the noise coming from downstairs. i didn't have much trouble sleeping. and on some days, she was gone, and it was quiet.

this changed when some guy moved into the place in 2023 or 2024. the two were and are pretty much constantly fighting, or at least unable to have a conversation at a normal volume. and naturally, two people attract more guests than one, right? the parties became more frequent.

i cannot stress enough how *much* of that i was forced to heard, not only in terms of frequency and volume, but also clarity. every insult, every punch. i felt like those people were fighting next to my bed. i tried to endure it, thinking that, who knows—maybe those two will break up soon, and then things will go back to, well, not normal, but the way it had been before. to somewhat ignorable.

but they didn't. instead, in the spring of 2024, they got a dog.

i once tried to do the math and concluded that molly spent between one and a half and two hours each day barking. she only learnt slowly, gradually, and painfully that this was not appreciated by the people who had adopted her.

but for the longest time, and especially during the colder seasons, i was exposed to roughly five hours of uninterrupted noise per day, unless it was party time, when the average is more about eight or nine.

after four years of trying to quietly ignore it, i just couldn't take it anymore. it was wearing me down, for once. my partner also made me understand that it was neither healthy nor acceptable. but what can you do?

i had never called the police, even when those people were bashing each others' heads in, because ... well, you know how they say that calling the cops will always make things worse for everyone involved? yeah.

this was in late 2024/early 2025. it got bad again around march and april 2025. like, really bad. so i did the same thing again, and my landlord presumably sent another letter. then it got okay-ish for about half a year.

also, my partner had moved to berlin in the meanwhile, so whenever it got too loud, we had a quiet place to stay (insert »foreshadowing is a literary device...« meme here).

constant screaming, constant laughter, sometimes violence, almost always accompanied by a dog either barking or wailing in pain because someone wanted her to stop. from 10pm to 7am, sometimes longer. on some days, we would wake after three or fours of sleep max to realise they were still at it.

so i sent over more protocols, and more letters were sent. one evening, i finally decided to nervously call the police. i wasn't even sure if they would be willing to come. this is berlin, after all!

but they came, were very friendly. they knocked on my neighbour's door, told everyone to behave and, ideally, disperse.

i called them again an hour later.

this would also become a pattern, that after a visit by the cops they would turn it down for ten minutes, and then proceeded as if nothing had happened. of course i could hear my neighbour when she was talking with the police, always lied and said that there was no-one there, and that she had been quiet. then, they laughed about it.