I hate this attitude that apartment dwellers shouldn't be able to live their lives. I regret that I went along and never played my flute while I lived in an apartment for many years. I think we should either be expecting some neighbor noise (during reasonable hours) or demanding that landlords soundproof thoroughly.

People like you are why I don't live in cities anymore.

Seriously, everytime there is some kind of pro-urbanist post here on HN, I think to myself "sure, but noise". And people who don't value peace and quiet.

I appreciate peace and quiet too, which is why I mentioned soundproofing. IIUC the standards for condos in my area are considerably stricter in this regard than those for apartments. I'd support raising the apartment standards to match.

As the sister comment said, noise isolation is what you want. I live in an apartment with masonry walls and floors, and I basically cannot hear anything from my neighbours. The most I hear is tap tap tap when someone above is walking with heels on.

Now if you have any ideas for noise outside I'm open :-) A hipster bar opened opposite last year (when we moved in there was a commercial unit that had been empty for a few years, turns out it was a restaurant with alcohol license before), and we regularly have drunk people speaking loudly/shouting outside in the evenings from Thursday - Saturday. We can obviously close the window (triple glazed), but it's nice to have a breeze coming in.

> I live in an apartment with masonry

I live in an earthquake zone. Masonry construction is illegal on almost the entire US West Coast.

That seems like a problem of poorly constructed/soundproofed apartments than anything.

I'm not sure cities are the place to find peace and quiet.

I came to the same conclusion, but urbanists get very angry when I tell them this.

... and then they rage-downvote me, apparently.

doing amateur carpentry work in your apartment, cutting up 2x4s and stuff to build furniture is unacceptable. Do it off site or in the parking garage or something. The amount of sawdust on the floor alone tells me this was a very noisy process.

Drilling into wood doesn't make much noise. Cutting wood with a hand saw doesn't make much noise. Using a hammer can be noisy, but a project like this wouldn't use many (or any) nails.

> doing amateur carpentry work in your apartment, cutting up 2x4s and stuff to build furniture is unacceptable

You do you, but this is my apartment. It is there especially to allow me to do the things that I want to do.

If this person is not doing carpentry work at 12 o’clock at night, they’re not disturbing anyone with their activities.

No, negative externalities aren’t ok when you do it, or when cities do it, or when businesses do it, or when anyone does it. You don’t get to harm other’s welfare. Take your construction project to a public park or outdoors somewhere

I don't think this whole conversation needs to be so dramatic.

I live in NYC and do projects like this chair all the time. I talk to my neighbors and ask them when they wont be home or when would be a good time to do X hours of work.

Most of the time they say don't worry about it as long as it's not past like 9pm or before 10am. I extend the same courtesy to my neighbors in turn. Just communicate and be reasonable.

So... Once an apartment or condo is built, that's it? No renovations, putting up shelves, etc?

Your position is completely unrealistic. Everyone causes a disturbance at times, but we generally try to minimize it and limit it to reasonable hours.

I hope you don't watch telly in your apartment; you should take that to a public park.

> or when anyone does it

See, this is where our opinion differs. I am perfectly ok with anyone doing it. I think this probably heavily depends on the culture you grew up in.

Or maybe some people are just intollerant, I really don’t know.

say that again after you've been awake until 2am working on a project, want to sleep in, and your neighbor brings a chop saw and drill into their apartment and starts slicing up 2x4 lumber in their living room the next morning.

I mean, that sucks, but I’d find it hard to blame my neighbor instead of myself.

Noise during the day isn't unreasonable

Except it's not your apartment, it's the landlord's apartment, and they probably have rules against being so loud that people in adjacent units want to move out.

Perhaps some Pig Destroyer

Those options aren't available to everyone, particularly during the pandemic. None of the apartments I lived in had outlets near parking or any kind of shared space appropriate for carpentry.

Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. No more of this, please—we're trying for something significantly different here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you aren't using powertools [I only saw a picture of two hand saws], woodworking makes very little noise. The loudest part of OPs project was probably vacuuming once they finished.

A quiet vacuum cleaner is one of the best surprises I had when moving out and buying many things new, thus making appliance decisions myself for the first time.

It doesn't have to be loud!

I literally vacuumed under my sleeping girlfriend (and it's not like she sleeps that deeply on the sofa, it just wasn't louder than the running TV). The loudest part is, unless you turn it to max power, the scraping of the thing over the floor. Compare that to the upstairs neighbours, who we barely hear except when they vacuum.

My mom's first reaction, when I excitedly told her, was "yeah but those don't have any power". Not sure, I've used a bunch of vacuum cleaners over the years (old or second-hand in student rooms, newer stuff at my parents' house) and this one doesn't do any better or worse than others. The EU also reduced the max power of new vacuum cleaners, apparently they're overspec'd for the job and people just buy what they think will get them done faster I guess? Haven't read up on it, I just remember reading that the max power allowance went down as of some recent year. Perhaps the loudness is subconsciously a proxy for performance since an ordinary person can hardly measure suction directly?

In the EU, appliances have a score card. In the case of vacuum cleaners it contains things like how well it vacuums, how much dust comes back out while vacuuming, how loud it is, how much power it uses, and another stat or two that I don't remember. They're all roughly the same (I just walked through the store from vacuum to vacuum for each stat to see what the best is you can get per price category) in pretty much every stat except noise level and power usage. In those two categories you can win a bunch for virtually no extra money and I'm super happy with it.

If you want quiet go live in the woods. Cities are for doing stuff. Doing stuff makes noise.

> Cities are for doing stuff.

Cities are just large human settlements with high density and a (mostly synthetic/mental) boundary defining it's area.

One of the many parts mostly any city has are residential areas. Noise is absolutely not desired there, even if you think it is. What you seem to be talking about are public, business and industrial areas for example. Demographic development has people living there, sure. But mostly because it's cheap because of the noise and other environmental issues.

Cities have always been cacophonous. Moving to a city and then asking your neighbors to be quiet is like moving next to a farm and then asking them to stop making smells. There is much more quiet real estate in America than noisy real estate — don’t go to New York City and then ask your neighbors to tread lightly after 8pm on weekends because your baby is sleeping.

Thankfully despite your opinion New York does a good job of putting these noise complainers in their place. Unless the noise is beyond the pale or at hours between 10pm and 7am, complainers are told to GTFO most of the time. Somehow the city still remains a highly sought after place to live, half of it because all the whiners who need silence for realigning their chakras have decamped to Hastings-on-Hudson.