Our old house had its share of irritating and unpleasant and downright unsettling noises. Our old fridge had some sort of short in the electrical panel that regulated the temperature, and would utter random musical trills at odd moments throughout the day. We never really knew what would set it off; sometimes it would be silent for weeks, other times there would be only minutes or seconds between its three-note plaintive bleat.
The neighbor whose fence backed up against our backyard had a dog who liked to bark every time he went outside. Every afternoon, the neighbor would let him out. And then he would bark persistently until she let him back in, which might be an hour or so. Sometimes his barks would be punctuated by her angry voice yelling at him to knock it off. Poor dog.
Occasionally, I would hear an ominous buzzing from somewhere in my bedroom walls. I was the only person who ever heard it. Only once did the exterminator find a nest of yellowjackets, but I did call him anxiously MANY times throughout the years.
It should be no surprise that our new house has its own symphony of noises. I’ve related some of them here – like the attack robin that has been body slamming our window all spring. And our doorbell, which had some sort of short in the wiring and would issue a loud buzzing at odd hours of the day and night. It took a trained electrician an ungodly amount of time to figure out how to fix it, but we did get a replacement doorbell that works and doesn’t wake us up with intermittent buzzing.
What DOES wake us up, however, is the hood fan in our kitchen. The kitchen in this house was one of the things I fell in love with when we first toured the place. It is huge, it has all of these top-of-the-line and beautiful appliances. The stove has a gorgeous vent hood above it.
However, the vent is suffering some sort of electrical short, and comes on by itself every so often. It did this in the early days when we moved in, but then stopped for several months. Every few months, it seems to recall that it’s broken, and starts up again. Often in the middle of the night. Our house has excellent acoustics, so even though it’s in the kitchen, I wake up immediately when it goes on in the middle of the night. Sometimes it will stay off for a few hours, sometimes only a few minutes.
Since I only just had the appliance repair person out here (to look at my ovens, which cost me $300 to learn that they heat appropriately even though that is not my experience with them), I am loathe to call him back to tell me it will cost several hundred/thousand dollars to fix the hood vent issue. So I have been trying stopgaps. With my dad’s help via email, I dismantled the components and cleaned them. This seemed to help for a few days and then the fan started coming on with renewed vengeance. The only thing that seems to help is turning off the power source at the breaker box, which “resets” it for awhile. We’ve had silence for more than a week now; how long will it last?
Our furnace also makes very odd noises. I’ve questioned the electrician, the HVAC person, and my dad about the noises and they all seem to think it’s a simple matter of the ducts expanding and contracting with the change in air temperature. I’ve mainly gotten used to the loud metallic rumbling and popping sounds; they do happen less frequently now that we use the air conditioner more than the heater.
Over Memorial Day weekend, during which we had a barbecue with my parents, we noticed a trilling sound coming from the trees. It was very charming and pastoral, a lovely summer sound. My mother thought it might be a tree frog. After my parents left and I went to bed, I noticed that whatever it was had set up camp directly outside my bedroom window. It was calling back and forth with a fellow critter and it was no longer charming – it was an ear-piercing squawk that cut through the silence at arrhythmic intervals so that my brain could not get used to it. At first I thought it was a racoon, because how could such a loud noise come from something as small as a frog? But then, after playing the racoon sounds at it to get it to LEAVE THE VICINITY, I realized the calls weren’t quite the same. I looked again for tree frog sounds and found this video, which is identical in pitch and cadence to the song of the frog who lives in my yard. Playing racoon sounds at it seems to help; apparently, racoons are the frog’s natural enemies.
The most unpleasant of the sounds is human, however. Our new next door neighbors suffered from a catastrophic house fire shortly before we moved in, and their house has been undergoing a complete renovation for the past year. Aside from the lovely port-a-potty in their driveway, the worst thing (for us) about this renovation is the presence of construction workers. They arrive SO EARLY, even on the weekends. But worst of all: one or more of them have a disturbing problem with either phlegm or morning nausea, and so the mornings are often punctuated by loogie hocking, retching, and vomiting sounds. IT IS A DELIGHT.
There was one Sunday morning when my husband and I were torn from our sleep at sixish by a noise. We both sat up and looked at each other with sleepy horror, certain that it was the sound of our child barfing in her bed. Fortunately for us, it was just the construction people, exorcising whatever demons they seem to bring to work with them.
A veritable orchestra! This sort of list is exactly why it takes some people several nights in a new place (after moving/on holiday etc) to be able to sleep properly.
Two thoughts – if you don’t want to go down the repair/replace route with your cooker hood, might you have an appliance isolation switch in your kitchen (we usually have them in the U.K.) that you could make turning off part of your bedtime routine? Failing that, maybe have switching it off and on at the breaker to reset it as you have already done as part of your Sat/Sun chores list?
As far as the construction work next door goes, surely your council or equivalent has rules on noisy working hours in residential areas (usually something like start time of 7am on weekdays and appreciably later or not at all over weekends)? Whilst I appreciate that you’ll want to be seen as understanding and accommodating neighbours, getting woken up that early (and unpleasantly) at the weekend is crazy!
I have never heard of an appliance isolation switch! But I think you are right that I need to simply make the “resetting at breaker” a part of normal life. Depending on how well it works, maybe once a month??? It is, of course, on the same breaker as our wifi, so that’s fun. But I can live without wifi for a short time every so often!
If there is anything worse than barfing noises, I don’t know what it is. Nothing brings me more immediate panic. Well, now the sound of garbage bins also brings me panic, but barfing…yikes. When we were in Calgary, I don’t know if you remember this but the house next door to us sold to a lovely gentleman who basically had it taken down to the studs to renovate. I remember trying to sleep and having banging banging banging going on past 10 pm as they were working on the part of their house that was nearest our bedroom. And then when they landscaped, beep beep beep all the time.
Now that we are basically rural, I only really hear bird noises and the occasional engine/ tires from young people (I assume young people) racing down the road across the field from us.
It is worst sound, Nicole! We jerk out of sleep with adrenaline coursing through our veins.
Bird noises is the way to go, for sure.
Oh my gosh, these sound awful! I struggle a bit with my hearing, where background noises are so loud to me so these things would literally drive me nuts! Do you guys sleep with a sound machine for some white noise to block out the sounds at all? That’s my saving grace living in my busy-people-up-at-all-times-of-day house.
Barf sounds ARE THE WORST. I dread nothing – nothing – more than being woken from sleep by barf sounds and then the yell of one of my children. It is the thing of horror movies.
We once had a carbon monoxide detector that would go off in the middle of the night (the issue was the plug, not the detector). I remember it once went off in the middle of the night in the middle of a rainstorm. I was home alone with the kids and very confident – after a dozen of these false alarms because the plug was loose and the detector would slip out and go off – we were not in danger. I grabbed the detector, walked outside in the rain at 2 am, and tossed it in our vehicle. Anyone walking by might have assumed we had a ticking bomb in our car, but I went inside and SLEPT. Shortly thereafter I moved it to a more reliable plug and it never went off again…
Right after we moved into our house I could hear this faint “skittering” noise each night. I spent months trying to track it down. I thought at first it was fireworks going off in town. YES, FIREWORKS. I kept looking out the windows. I finally traced it to our ductwork and was forever on my belly, ear to a grate, listening. It drove me crazy! After 6 months of this, I finally figured out it was a mouse running through the ductwork and that “skittering” was its tiny paws. We found a tiny hole on the outside of our house, plugged it with expanding foam, and caught several mice in traps. My biggest fear was having a mouse DIE IN THE DUCTWORK. Can you imagine the smell and the horror of getting that removed? Thankfully, between the trapping and the plugging, my ducts are now clear of mice.
Yeah, it’s interesting all the noises each house has. But- human noises are the WORST. It’s unlikely you’ll be personally offended or enraged by the refrigerator or the range hood, but people have that effect. In addition to the irritation of the noise, you just feel like THEY SHOULDN’T BE DOING THAT. Well… at least it’s temporary (??) Any idea how much longer the renovation will go on? And, I would also look into some sort of noise regulation rule for your community. 6:00 am on a Sunday is too early, by anyone’s standards.
I have something that is coming outside my bedroom window many mornings around 4-5am to make many yipyipyip sounds and wake me from a sound sleep. I thought it was coyotes as we have a healthy neighborhood population but I’ve now heard it during the daytime, so now I am thinking some kind of bird? We have a huge flock of crows/ravens and they are enormous. They land on my roof above my office with such a clatter that the first few times I heard them, I thought it was a human on the roof. So maybe it is them. If I get up and flick the outside light on and off a few times, they get quiet or go away.
And we had early morning construction noise for many months when the house next to ours was being built. It is quite close to my bedroom so it would wake me up and often my bed would literally shake. Barfing noises are way worse though. You have my sympathies.
I sympathize with your noise situation regarding neighbors doing a complete renovation. The house beside us was built a few years after we moved here. The once beautiful vacant lot became an epicenter of machine noises, men shouting, and dirt blowing into our house. Eventually it ended.
OMG. Someone needs to see an allergist or a dietician to stop with the morning noises! Gross.
All homes have noises, ours certainly does. We have an almost new fridge that occasionally makes a somewhat alarming buzzing sound in the freezer; it sounds like the ice maker is stuck, but the water source isn’t even hooked up to the ice portion, so what gives? Also, since we had plumbing work done, and they added something ‘special’ to the piping in our master bath so we get hot water faster, well, now I hear creaking sounds UP there, all the damn time. HUH?
You are so brave with working on the vent hoot. What was the thing you fixed in your last house? The garbage disposal? I’m still astonished by that!
Frogs, raccoons, but maybe squirrels? Sounds like an episode of Wild Planet in your yard, Suzanne.
Constant hangover? I can’t imagine the horror of hearing barfing noises in the morning. I have a cat and am ultra attuned to those sorts of noises. Sorry about the crazy cacophony of sounds you have to deal with. My house has creaks, the sound of distant trains, an occasional car and some late military planes flying over. I’m used to those particular sounds although I will NEVER get used to the cat scratching insistently on the door to her room where I close her up at night!
Oh gosh, the sound of someone else vomiting is terrible!! Yikes. I hope that house is done as soon as possible but I know those projects can take forever! So you have my sympathy!! And then to have all the other random noises! Sheesh. I sleep with ear plugs and if I am sleeping hard, they can really work to create a barrier. So I am less sensitive to noises when sleeping now that I wear them. This morning I was up at 4 and couldn’t fall back to sleep so I had to read for awhile. Then I must have fallen into a deep sleep because my husband had to shake me awake at 5:45 to let me know Taco was yelling for me. So the noise problem in my home is nearly entirely related to children right now, and Taco in particular is JUST SO LOUD!!!
The hood thing is annoying. If I could teleport my electrician father to you, I would!!
I don’t notice the noises of our house until the second my husband is gone. I am the one who has to make sure that crash was just the cat knocking something off the table (the big jerk) instead of someone breaking in to steal the cat (my best baby in the world). There are a lot of noises, though. My favorite is the neighbors who have to mow their lawns at 6am on Sunday morning. I get that it’s cooler then, but some of us are trying to sleep in!
Barfing sounds- THE WORST.
I also don’t like when someone plays music so loudly that the bass is thumping. It is so distracting for me. I think it’s a sensory thing.
Also, weedwhacker noises.
House noises are so annoying; my dryer currently squeaks like crazy. It’s right next to my office so that’s nice.
But I think the noise that makes me the craziest is when my husband eats; particularly anything crunchy.
Ok, this is going to sound weird, but seems to be such an American thing… our house, appliances, HVAC, … all make sounds, too (some really annoying). When I am in Germany at my parents house, it’s completely quiet.
Of course, you’re never save from loud construction workers anywhere.
That tree frog sound haunting! And, so many house sounds. Yeesh. We, too, have construction across the street as they’ve knocked over a long abandoned house and are building a new one. I think by town law, they cannot start until 7am – but they sure do arrive at 6 am with loud trucks beeping as they back down the street, shouted coffee orders, and just loud nonsense that wakes me up anyway. Here’s to fast construction and more quiet!
I laughed out loud multiple times when I read over your descriptive languages, especially that of the refrigerator. Thank you for such an entertaining post!
I am hugely noise-sensitive too, and most of this would drive me crazy. We have an intake vent on the side of our house that flaps and taps in the wind more than usual – I’ve become completely accustomed to it, but people who are over often find it alarming.
WHO leaves a dog outside barking for AN HOUR? We let Lucy out for five minutes to go pee, and we bring her right back in if she barks (she does, often, but we let it go for thirty seconds max).
I know construction workers have to do their job, but I really dislike it when that job intrudes on my living space, even auditorily. I hope they finish quickly. The coughing description made me wince because I’m pretty sure that’s what people have been thinking about me for the past few weeks, and every year when I got the catastrophic cough. It’s unpleasant to experience, but I’m sure it’s unpleasant to hear as well.