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.

she most certainly did not stop doing that after receiving her »final warning,« and indeed ended up throwing another party—her largest yet—a few days after she must have received that letter.

at this point, we're absolutely on the brink after two and a half months of constant terror. two friends are away for a few weeks, they let us stay at their place. but there is light at the end of this tunnel: in february, we can move to my partner's flat again (insert »foreshadowing...« meme once more).

we're gone for most of february, hoping that the issue at my place will be resolved once and for all, ideally when we come back! this would also be great because it is apparent now that the person who's moved into the flat above my partner's is also a little, well, loud.

there's two things: a piano, the same piece over and over again between 1 and 2pm.

and the stomping.

so, the house used to be a factory in the 19th and 20th century, so it isn't exactly super soundproof.

but on the other hand, it should be able to turn down the volume a little bit. put a rug below the piano pedal so that it doesn't hit the wooden floor directly. put on some slippers, you know, the ones with the squishy rubber soles. they're € 5 if you buy the expensive kind.

in early march, my partner goes up to her and tells her about the volume, suggests these obvious and easy solutions. the next day, the piano is noticeably less loud. still there, but ignorable. perfect!

but the stomping continues.

now, you might wonder how bad it can be? for starters, we could barely ever hear the two previous tenants. the occasional tap, tip, tap, faint and ignorable. this is different, it sounds like some is banging loudly at your apartment door—and constantly.

it seems like this new neighbour is dead set on doing her daily 10k between 11pm and half past midnight, every night without exception. pure torture.

so we ring at her door again, this time is the two of us. i'm surprised to see a tiny young woman standing in front of us—how can this person be so loud?

bored facial expression while we explain everything, that we sometimes get up very early for work. monosyllabic when it's her turn to speak, »oh, didn't realise this was a problem.« no sorry, but who cares, right? as long as we got the message across, all good.

in the evening, it's quiet enough. cool.

that was that, then.

as it turns out on the next evening, that wasn't that, then. same as usual.

after a days more of that, we leave her a note. again explaining everything, again suggesting that she just get some soft slippers, and everything will be fine. or else, sorry, we will have to file a complaint with the landlord—we have a lot of experience with that kind of stuff, after all. final resort, etc.

this will surely bring her to her senses.

two days later, i am standing on the balcony and see her and a friend coming home. they talk about me, it seems—i can't say for certain, i think they speak russian. but then they switch to english, laughing and cracking jokes that appear to make fun of me. i don't care, as long as they realise and respect that we're downstairs and would like to have a quiet evening.

they get in, they start trampling on purpose and laugh all the way through it for half an hour. so now it's two of them.

so nothing has changed, in fact she seems intent on provoking us even further.

but hold on, my apartment should be fine now, no? (insert »foreshadowing...« meme yet again.)

turns out, my downstairs neighbour wasn't kicked out. we learn from a lawyer that a »final legal consequence« is just another letter threatening her once more.

due to the weather being better, she's home less, the guy isn't currently there as frequently. but at night, she still goes crazy.

we spent the entire last week trying to deal with both situations simultaneously, again documenting stuff, trying to find ways of making others do something while not exactly getting much sleep.

my downstairs neighbour wakes us up twice, both times around 3am in the morning. on another night, she and some other people are moving furniture around the apartment around midnight. my partner's upstairs neighbour goes on even longer stomping runs.

yesterday, we booked a night at a hotel.

we paid € 70 total to get around nine hours of sleep in a comfy bed in a non-descript hotel a few minutes away, room 303 (acieeeeed, etc.). something tells me it won't be the last time. a friend has a place outside the city, we might stay there for the weekend.

this is our life now.

we're both mentally and psychologically exhausted. i don't have much work these days, but try and go live on the radio and say substantial things about a sensitive topic after two hours of sleep.

yesterday during the day, i even got dizzy twice. the mix of sleep deprivation and stress can do that to you, i guess.

so, yeah ... we need to find ways to improve our situation, but we also need to just ... get some proper sleep once in a while. it isn't easy to juggle all these responsibilities while you still have to work to make money to pay the rents for apartments in which life is hell.

@konkrit I am so sorry to hear that (no pun intended).

I am somewhat noise sensitive and your whole story sounds awful.