The Nice Thing About Living in an Apartment... - Comments

@ Painted Smiles

Don't be terribly impressed. It took every ounce of self control, after they refused to answer their door to discuss the matter, not to just scrawl "DON'T BE ASSHOLES" on a piece of paper and Krazy-Glue it to their door. >.> But I decided to take a few deep breaths and write out a calmly worded letter.

It helps that I have anxiety issues and any degree of confrontation makes me feel sick to my stomach. I've been agonizing over the note I DID leave for the last hour but I'm trying to stiffen my resolve and not run downstairs and take the note from their door before they read it because I'm a firm believer that if you have an issue with someone the responsible way to handle it is to confront them and state directly what your issue with them is. And I did that in a note because I was unable to do so directly, so I hope that won't be interpreted as a passive-aggressive retaliation on my part.

Your ability to handle annoying/rude people amazes me.
That should be a goal of mine! Because, in all honesty, if someone had done that to me, I would have hammered that bookshelf twice as loudly and in the exact same place that they had pounded their ceiling.

Good luck, girl! You might need it if they continue living downstairs :D

@ AmorarEsDeVivir
Oh I totally understand, Until a couple months ago, I had a porn star living above me.

@ triplehearts

Just lovely.

Since they didn't want to have a grown-up conversation and open their door after rudely making our apartment shake, I left a note on their door along the lines of:

"We are just trying to put together a bookshelf at what we believe is a reasonable time (i.e. not the middle of the night when people are sleeping). I understand the sound can be frustrating, but it needs to be done. You were willing to pound on your ceiling, but not answer the door when I came downstairs to discuss this.

If there is some specific reason that 6pm is an inappropriate time to you for us to do this work (e.g., sleeping baby), please let us know and we will try to be more accommodating in the future. But there is no need for rudeness or passive-aggression."

I'm sure they'll take issue with that too, but quite frankly that's on them. I wanted to politely explain the situation the same way I would have had they been willing to answer the door, and also state directly why I had taken issue with them like an adult does when having an issue with another adult.

It ended up taking us almost two hours to put together the bookshelf, because in order to avoid pissing off our neighbors more, we ended up pushing all the nails in like pushpins by leaning on the hammer with our body weight. We both slipped a couple times and have minor injuries because of it (my hand was bleeding for a while after it slipped pushing in one of the nails and my husband scraped his hand and almost hit his face into the damn shelf because he was leaning forward with all his weight--nails are not meant to be pushed in that way obviously). We JUST got done. We should've been done over an hour ago but even though we weren't doing anything wrong by putting the shelf together in early evening we still wanted to avoid making further noise. I don't know why we bothered trying to accommodate them with their rudeness, but there we are. At least the damn shelf is done now.

Apartment neighbors are fantastic, aren't they?