Unit owner rights

My wife and I have owned our condo for 11 years, over the past year we have been victims of noise disturbance from our upstairs neighbor who resides over us. We have a 15 month old child and the noise continues over our bedrooms all through the night and into the early morning hours. We have contacted the neighbor and have kindly asked if we could get relief from this noise as we are not able to sleep and our son is waking quite frequently, the responses never opt for a solution and he seems to think this is okay behavior. The noise is caused by the unit owners 2 cats which he took in from outside they are running around and jumping off everything and lots of times knocking big things over, this believe it or not is loud enough to disturb our lives daily. This has become an issue since the unit owner has taken in the second cat over a year ago. We are at our limits and feel like we will be forced to leave our home, what kind of legal rights do we have to protect us and to force our neighbor to stop. Somebody please help, we are in Massachusettes.

Thank you kindly
Best regards
Darren

To find out what your legal rights are, contact a local attorney.

You may want to look at some sound proofing options for your own unit.
There are various options available at various price ranges. Do an internet search for
"soundproofing existing ceiling" to see various options.

Hope this helps,

Tim

Thank you to all of you who have replied. This is a very old building 1830 to be exact, it would never pass with today's building codes. The homeowner did change carpeting to wood flooring however there are no parameters written into the by laws prohibiting this unfortunately. The association is not willing to hire a lawyer to make any amendments to the bylaws because the expense and where there is only 9 units as long as no one else is being disrupted it doesn't seem to be of any importance. I have been documenting and think that I should also record the sound levels somehow. I feel that maybe the only way to get any where with some sort of remediation would be to contact a civil lawyer and see what our options are.

Thank you all

Best
Darren

Darren,

Even though your association seems to have no standards for flooring, my understanding is that the International Building Code does address the issue of noise transmission.

There have been several previous threads on this forum regarding flooring, noise, and standards. Try searching "ASTM" for some of the more technical threads. There is also some discussion of this subject, albeit very technical, at http://www.soundstepunderlayment.com/Home/acoustic-underlayment

There is a possibility that your upstairs neighbor was required to obtain a building permit for his wood flooring and did not. If a permit was required he may have also been required to demonstrate that the installation meets code standards. Check with your local building department to see what was required.

One point made on the website referenced above is that the final results are entirely dependent on the actual installation and cannot be predicted from the known values of the components. That is, even if the flooring meets standards and is installed as directed it may still fail due to the building's structure and the quality of the workmanship.