r/neighborsfromhell • u/1blindspot • 3h ago
WWYD? Vent/Rant My downstairs neighbors turn their shower on and off every minute for hours. What could they possibly be doing?
TL;DR: My downstairs neighbors have recently started turning their shower on and off roughly once a minute, sometimes for 3–7 hours a day, and the sound travels through the plumbing. I’m going insane with the noise and going insane trying to figure out what they could possibly be doing. Edit: And no, it does not seem to be a leaking toilet flush.
I lived for about 13 years in an apartment where the walls were basically made of paper. I could hear every single noise my neighbors made. As someone who really appreciates quiet and works with research and lots of reading, you can imagine how happy I was when I moved to a new apartment last year, which has thick walls that block most of the noise from the neighbors.
It’s super quiet. Or, at least, it was.
For the past month or so, something has changed. For some reason, my downstairs neighbors (a couple, plus the woman’s brother) have started spending hours in the bathroom turning the shower tap on and off repeatedly.
I’m talking about roughly once a minute, sometimes for three hours in the morning and another four hours in the evening (up to 2am at times). Sometimes it’s only the evening, sometimes only the morning, and sometimes they skip a day or two, but it happens almost every day.
The weird thing is that I don’t hear voices or other bathroom noises. I hear the water sounds through the building’s plumbing. If they leave the water running continuously, I barely notice it. But when it’s being turned on and off over and over again for hours, it drives me absolutely nuts.
And, of course, my brain keeps trying to figure out what the hell they could possibly be doing. Is there some kind of extremely long cosmetic procedure involving hair? Some bizarre cleaning routine? Something medical? I genuinely have no idea. What could someone possibly be doing in a bathroom that involves turning the shower on and off approximately once a minute for hours?
The worst part is that I really don’t want to have any interaction with these people.
They never come to our building meetings, and I already have a bad relationship with them for other reasons. For context, they were using my assigned parking spot without my authorization for quite a while. After I complained, one of my deliveries mysteriously disappeared the following day. I obviously have no proof that the two things were connected, but the whole situation left me with absolutely no desire to confront them about anything fearing some kind of revenge.
So I’m not looking to go downstairs and ask them what they’re doing. I’d just really like to understand what the hell might be going on, because the noise drives me crazy, AND the uncertainty itself doubles the drives-me-crazy effect. Every time I hear it, my mind starts wandering and trying to figure it out.
Any thoughts or ideas about what could possibly explain this?
And yes, I know someone will probably suggest earphones/headphones. Unfortunately, I have a chronic skin issue that makes earphones very uncomfortable, and I’ve tried quite a few kinds. Depending on what I’m doing, I can sometimes use brown noise on my computer, but that isn’t always practical depending on what I am doing.
Edit: It's not the toilet flush or the flapper, the only place I can hear voices from the neighbor is in the toilet, and I always hear the woman's voice and her opening or closing drawers in the toilet every now and then during the whole process. Believe me, after 4 weeks of this, these patterns become clear (I did consider toilet leaking in the beginning as well)