Introduction

Hi. My name is Zach Walls. I'm 28 years old. I work as an IT Admin. I do a little improv and some theatrical lighting in my spare time. I have a lovely girlfriend named Katie, and I live in a basement apartment at **REDACTED ADDRESS** in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC, which is where our problems (and the reason for this blog) begin.

In September of 2008 Katie and I, after living together in Alexandria, VA for a couple of years, decided it was time to move into the city. With the help of Craigslist and a lot of patient searching, we found a lovely little basement apartment in Adams Morgan. When we looked at the apartment, we spoke with **REDACTED**, the girlfriend of the owner, **REDACTED LANDLORD**, both of whom live in the main (non-basement) portion of the building. During the process of looking at the apartment, signing the lease, etc., we never did meet **REDACTED LANDLORD**, but **REDACTED** seemed nice enough, and the apartment was nice, and in a neighborhood we wanted to live in. During this time, we only once had any forewarning of the difficulties we would soon face, when **REDACTED** said something to the effect of, "We like to stay up late, so you might hear us once in a while." Now, I've lived in a number of less-than-silent environments such as dorms, and Katie and I often go to bed at midnight or 1am ourselves, so we didn't consider this a problem. Little did we know that "a little late" often means "until dawn" and "you might hear us once in a while" means, "you can hear everything, we do this a couple of times a week, and we will make no attempt to mitigate our noise." These are not the same thing, and I don't believe any person would normally interpret them to be so.

We began moving into the apartment on October 1, spending our first night there on October 6. Within the first week there, we were kept awake on two separate nights by parties taking place in the landlord's kitchen, which is directly above our bedroom. The amount of noise coming from the room above us was ridiculous. The vast majority of conversation in the kitchen was audible in the bedroom. The footsteps, movement of chairs, and opening and closing of cabinets was enough to vibrate the walls of the bedroom. The bass-notes of the music (obviously provided by a multi-room stero) were clearly audible not only in the bedroom, but throughout the rest of our apartment. Still, we decided to let it go, and to approach the landlord about it like reasonable people.

Early the next week, I worked from home while I waited for an installer to come hook up our DSL line to the new apartment. While I was waiting, I happened to hear the landlord, **REDACTED LANDLORD**, return from work to his home in the afternoon. I figured that this would be a good opportunity to politely resolve the matter, so I wandered out of my front door to speak to **REDACTED LANDLORD** before he went inside. Now, as it's been a few weeks, the following should not be interpreted as a literal transcript, but the conversation went something like this:

Zach: Hey **REDACTED LANDLORD**, I just wanted to mention that our bedroom is right below your kitchen..

REDACTED LANDLORD: Yeah, you can hear everything, right? We've had complaints about that before. **REDACTED** didn't tell you that?

Zach: She told me that you guys stay up late and that we might hear you once in a while.

**REDACTED LANDLORD**: We thought about soundproofing, or rearranging the layout of the downstairs, but that didn't work...

and then my landlord, the person I'm paying nearly $1800/month to for this apartment, literally said, "you're screwed," and suggested I invest in some earplugs.

Strangely enough, I did already happen to have a jar of foam earplugs, rated for 32dBa of sound reduction, that I bought for use when working in the server room at work. Not that one should have to sleep with earplugs in, but we have tried it. Guess what? It hasn't worked too well, and we still get woken up by the parties upstairs. We've tried putting a fan in the bedroom to generate white-noise. We can still hear the stomping and chair-scraping and cabinets and shouted conversations. It's been almost two months of living here now, and we have literally been woken from a dead sleep at least once a week (usually twice or more a week) by parties that start between midnight and 2am and don't end until somewhere between 3am and 6am.

I like to think we're reasonable people, and we do have a lease. A lease is a legal agreement, and I don't particularly want to break it. However, my landlord is not holding up his end of the bargain. A person should be able to sleep in a place they're paying rent for, and they should expect reasonable accommodation from the owners of said space. Had the landlord not been so rude about the matter, all it would have taken to satisfy us was moving the party to a different room and turning the radio down a little bit. Instead, I've spent the last few weeks talking to friends and relatives in the legal profession about how to get out of this lease without being at-fault.

From what I've been told, the landlord is likely in breach of the Covenant of Quiet Enjoyment. However, I have also been told that I should send a certified letter detailing the complaint, and that I should build my case by documenting the time/duration of the disturbances, hence this blog.

Thank you for reading, and if you feel like following our saga here, or sending words of encouragement, we appreciate it.

-Zach