Living with laminate flooring noise affects personality

I am a different person when I spend time away from home. I can relax, I can sleep easily, I awake feeling good about the coming day. I can focus on anything I want to knowing I will not be ripped from my own thoughts by loud, harsh noises raining down from above.

Returning to my home I feel the dread closing in, as if I am walking into a prison cell. Even if the noise is not present when I enter, I know that it will come. Almost immediately I feel myself transform into another person - a person who is anxious and fearful, jumpy and depressed. It is like a light goes out inside me knowing that I have to live here until change comes.

The noise did come and it came loud. Three hours and three pairs of outdoor shoes running around all over the property upstairs. Three hours of doors slamming, furniture grinding and random thuds and bangs. It was impossible to find a place in my home, the place that is supposed to be my sanctuary from the world, to sit without noise. Loud noise.

Currently I do not have a bedroom. I sleep in whichever room I guess will have the least disturbance. I don't always guess right.

Life, like the chairs on the laminate flooring above me, grinds on.

Laminate Flooring Noise Fragments Minds

Laminate flooring, by its nature, creates a singular canvas for sound. Each board is fitted to adjacent boards so closely that noise transfers without interruption from the point of impact to the outer edges of the flooring. If laminate flooring is installed throughout an apartment it is essentially a one piece sound conductor of every impact sound that takes place upon it. This means a thump in the front lounge can be heard in a back bedroom.

Living under an apartment where laminate was installed without acoustic soundproofing, where the laminate is butted right up against the skirting/walls and where the construct of the building means the upper floor and the ceiling below are one piece means that every sound is force fed into the apartment below.

There is a myth that rugs help but it is just that - a myth.

Impact noise on laminate floors is a unique way to disturb a person's life. It is not a constant noise like a television or a stereo, it is a random noise in pattern, frequency and decibels. One never knows when a footstep is going to fall or if it will be followed by running, jumping or stamping. Once the noise begins, one never knows when the noise will end. One can try to disconnect from the noise, but the longer one is subjected to these interruptions the less possible this becomes.

Living with laminate flooring noise essentially means that ones thoughts become ruptured by other people's noise. Attention to a television programme, or concentration on reading become fragmented as time goes on. In fact that is the best description one has for the longterm effect of laminate flooring impact noise on the mind - fragmented.