apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

My home is the least of my worries; I actually relax by thinking about/planning needed repairs (of course, as long as they're not major)...then I use Xanax...forget the sheep.

my husband snores. i punch him on the shoulder. doesn't help me sleep, but i do feel better.

My bedroom is a refuge. Soft lighting and shades of purple. When I really have trouble I listen to a relaxation CD.

I usually fall asleep within 5 minutes of hitting the bed. My husband is the tough sleeper...listening to an audiobook on his iphone helps him a lot.

Our cozy apartment has always been a comfort to us, but recently we are losing sleep over our neighbor's (a private school) plans to build a new structure right outside our windows. Our co-op board is employing a lawyer, but evidently there is not much that we can do about. So, in a year or so we'll have a 23-foot brick wall about 10 feet from our windows... all 4 of our windows.

My building makes endless popping noises all night - it's the steel wall framing popping on its screws between the concrete floorplates and columns which expands in the heat of the day and and contracts in the cool of the night...
...then there's the single-pane glass windows which let me hear the roar of the traffic, thump-thumping car stereos and screaming homeless folks on the streets below...
...and if I'm lucky, I'll just see the flash of the red-light runner cameras and not hear a full-on collision at the blind intersection a couple blocks away.

Oh Yes, Life in the Big City...

My worries sometimes keep me up. They're often house-related, and include an endless to-do list and the stress of figuring out how to afford the critical things on the list.

Sometimes if I find myself dwelling on stressful things, I think about decorating rooms in my house. That's the fun part!

Or I count backwards from 1000. I don't usually maintain the count, and often my thoughts will drift. But I usually end up sleeping soon after the counting begins.

My partner and I were forced to move due to neighbor noise. The daytime stuff was tolerable, but our upstairs neighbor kept late-night hours, would come home around midnight to one am every single night and drop his shoes on the hard wood floors right above our heads.

When we talked to the landlord about it, he said that he hadn't written in a requirement to cover the floors partially with rugs - a stipulation present in our lease, although we put down rugs to be kind to our neighbors even without that requirement. Upstairs dood was un-sympathetic despite telling us that he had been in the same situation before!

Finally we just took his advice and moved - into a top floor flat, where we made sure to ask our downstairs neighbors to let us know if any noise from above disturbed their sleep.

House issues that keep me awake at night:

Will the recently patched roof hold?
Why does the tenant's boiler leak so much water in the basement?
I hope the thunderstorm doesn't cause water back-up in our basement?

Far, far more often however is my concern about what the gang-bangers are doing outside my window.

Well, just looking at those sheep makes me start worrying about coyotes.

I've been having a lot of sleepless nights lately. Before we moved last weekend it was "there's so much left to pack!" Now it's "there's so much left to unpack!" We moved from a townhouse in a semi-busy neighborhood next to an expressway with a hospital (i.e. ambulance sirens all night long) to a large, dark, quiet neighborhood. So quiet, in fact, that its keeping me up at night!

When we lived in the townhouse there was constant light coming from street lights, the gas station across the street, etc. At the new place it's so dark and the rooms are so huge that everything echos. We didn't realize how bare our bedroom would look even after everything was moved into it! My bed looks tiny in the new bedroom when it was far too large for the old one!

But we love our new home and as soon as the last load is moved and we're free of our old place forever, maybe I'll be able to sleep more soundly at night.

My neighbours in the adjoining apartment to mine, like to speak to each other at top volume, after midnight, usually during the week. And they love a hearty bit of door slamming, just to announce they are back from nightclubbing.
Fan-frickin'-tastic.
My lack of sleep is turning me into the evil snarling spinster next door. Not how I ever though i'd see myself, but running on less than 6 hours sleep is not fun and transforming.....
Debating selling up if it doesn't stop.

my house is too quiet most of the time.

when the windows are open, i don't mind the sound of the trains (2 lines, one of them the main one through town, and each is a block and a half in a different direction - east and north), but the main fire hall 2 blocks to the west is something i'm still trying to get used to after a year.

when the windows are closed, i run a fan in my bedroom on low at night.

Neighbor's son, who keeps strange hours and comes in and out the side yard banging the garden gate at all hours and causing their outdoor light to go on/off, wakes me constantly. So far I've used a sound deadening paint on the walls, blackout fabric on the window facing their yard (and in the guest bedroom as well), and have two choices to disguise the noise: a white sound machine and a small water fountain. Problem is, the pets will drink from the water fountain so I have to make certain it's kept very full so the motor doesn't burnout. All those combined have helped mute his noise until the day they kick his b*tt out or I win the lottery and move.

Complete lack of natural light makes our apartment too cold.
Complete lack of natural light makes our apartment sad.
Complete lack of natural light makes our apartment ugly.

I loose sleep trying to figure out how to use what we have to design our new home. It took me 3 years and hours and hours scouring apartment therapy, but everything finally works great in our old home. How do I make it work in our new home?

I've been counting sheep over the drawn out process of us trying to buy a house. Down to the last step, but it's the only one that matters...being approved by the underwriter for our loan.