Neighborly frictions

Living in societies intrinsically means interacting with one another. Often these are willing and mutually agreed interaction, such as greeting when meeting on the street or throwing a party for the kids in the neighborhood. However, it is also unavoidable that some activities that are meant to be private end up having unintended effects on the nearby people, and the closer we live together, the stronger these reciprocal interactions are. 

If you live in a ranch in the middle of the prairie and you have a shooting practice with your rifle in your backyard, it is unlikely that someone else will be within earshot or, if ever, they will waive it away as a normal thing. Do that in a suburban environment and you will have the police at your door within five minutes to inquire about the nature of the shots. The same goes for loud music in the garden or a particularly smoky bonfire, but, as in the prairie setting, there will be certain activities that are very unlikely to annoy the neighbors: firing up the grill or playing your saxophone indoors will not make anyone bat an eyelash. Translate that, however, to a flat, where you are likely to have two neighbors next door plus one above and one below you, and the situation changes radically: noises can carry over the structure of the building, so simple acts like stomping your feet, displacing furniture or even sweeping the floors a bit too enthusiastically can earn you a angry visit. The same goes for boiling cabbage or frying sardines, which can leave an enduring stench that haunts you for days.

Photo: Matthew Paul Argall

However, the paradigm of neighborly disturbances is construction work. The nature of the work itself makes it long and noisy, often combines the constant drone of a diesel generator with the unexpected crash of a pile of bricks, and frequently a source of dust and even bad odors. In flats the noise of the drill removing bathroom tiles can carry for many floors. The elevator will be clad in protective stuff for days or weeks, the hallways covered in a layer of pervasive clay powder that creeps even under your door. Unarguably, this is a necessary nuisance, since houses grow old, plumbing starts to get leaking, the electricity makes the safety jump at its own will, windows do not fit that well anymore and rooms become drafty and even the toilet bowl eventually needs to be replaced.

This inescapable need to update your house has become even more evident in the time of the pandemic. It is easy to forget about your drafty living room when you barely spend one hour per day in it, but when the curtains keep billowing all day long while you sit in you zoom meeting the perception changes. Boosted by all the money that we are all saving by not eating out, not going to cultural events and not traveling, the home improvement industry is booming. The conjuncture is so unprecedented that some regions are seeing significant shortages in construction material, such as Germany, where some projects have been forced to stop by lack of timber even in a year of record-setting harvest. But its necessity does not imply that everything is allowed while improving your house.

The implicit assumption is that, due to the disturbances it causes, the person in charge of the construction will go out of their way to minimize the impact in the neighbors, and this has a number of dimensions, from cleanliness, to noise levels or working hours. However, it all happens to come back to money, because, by definition a "quiet" jackhammer is going to be more expensive to acquire and to operate than a "normal" drill (otherwise the quiet drill will naturally replace the normal and noisier one and even save some costs in the process). Starting to work at 8 a.m. instead of at 7 a.m. to avoid waking up everyone also means that the construction will take a couple of days longer and therefore cost a few days' wages more. In other words, the cheaper you build, the higher is the potential to disturb the neighbors and vice versa.

The extreme of this case of this cost saving, which I have been suffering recently, is taking up the construction on your own: people trained in construction work are frequently able to pull through surprisingly big projects without any help or with just minimal help at specific points. When all you have to pay is the materials but no wages, the bottom-line price of the renovation come really cheap, but the work extends a lot longer over time that it would with an external contractor. Our neighbor across the street has been doing precisely that for the last two weeks: he has spent endless hours removing concrete with an electric drill and then cutting stones with an angle grinder to cover the gap. The job should not have taken more that two or three days for a well equipped team of four or five, but instead he has decided to take all his pending vacation from last year (this is just a speculation but he has been at it during normal working hours, so it seems likely) and pestered the whole neighborhood for days.

Technically, he is in his right to conduct the construction as he sees fit as long a he has a valid working permit. Morally, it is disputable that he can save money by making all of his neighbors pay with their peace for the longer duration of the work. I have been tempted to go to talk to him, but this morning I saw that the dumpster was gone from his driveway so it is likely that a complaint would come late at this point and cause unnecessary neighborly frictions. Let us hope that the loudest part of the work is done. Enjoy the weekend!