You should have started calling the cops on them a long time ago instead of banging on the floor - that never works, always leads to the sort of escalation you describe. If you simply want to move away from them (which is usually the easiest solution), you certainly have grounds to ask to be let out of your lease if there is a quiet enjoyment clause in it, but if your landlord fights it you'll probably want to get a lawyer. It may be easier to just wait it out, depending on the attitude of the landlord.

I thought I would give an update. Since our chat with the neighbor in November, there haven't been any more visits from the police. We're pretty sure that he can't hear the drums anymore, because even on the weekends when we are pretty sure he is home he hasn't called the cops. There's even been one or two occassions where he and my husband have had occassion to chat about something else. Things are much more peaceful, and I'm no longer fearful every time I hear the neighbor close his door or see him outside. The more time that goes by the less and less I believe the neighbor's story about how the cops and the apartment manager all told him that they were going to tell my husband to stop playing the drums. I'm just not buying it. It doesn't make sense that they would tell him that and then not put it in their reports. I only believed it when he first told us cuz he sounded sincere. Now I'm thinking he's just a very skilled liar. Based on his claim that the manager had told him she was going to evict all of us if we didn't settle things, and a few posts from property owners here and on other boards that they wouldn't renew a lease with a tenant that had a lot of complaints against them, I got worried that we wouldn't be offered a renewal. I didn't want to accuse the manager of telling us one thing and the neighbor something else, and I didn't want to bring up his accusation that she was going to evict all of us. But I wanted to make sure that we were going to be offered a renewal when our lease comes up in April. I had mentioned this to my husband, and just yesterday he had something else he wanted to talk to her about. So, while he was there he asked her if there was going to be any trouble with us renewing our lease after all of the trouble with the neighbor. She laughed, said if there was anyone she wasn't offering a renewal to it would be the neighbor, and asked my husband if he'd like to sign the new lease right then. I'm seriously doubting that she said anything to the neighbor about evicting us. So, given the evidence, or perhaps lack of evidence to substantiate the neighbor's claims, we're pretty confident that he's lying his head off. I figure that he realized that he wasn't going to be able to force hubby to quit the drums by calling the cops all the time, cuz they weren't on his side about it. He wasn't going to be able to get the manager to tell us to stop cuz she wasn't on his side either. Maybe he was even told by the cops that if he kept calling them they might write him a ticket for wasting their time after they had told him it was fine. So he tried an approach he hadn't tried before, he tried being nice. And it worked. So there's a tip for people with problem neighbors....if being nice doesn't work at first, try being an a-hole for a while. Then when you're nice again it'll be such a relief to your neighbor they'll be happy to listen. Now, why he felt he had to lie and tell us that the cops were telling him something different than they were telling us, I don't know. I think he was counting on us not having the police reports, or maybe that they wouldn't be as detailed as they were. Oh well, I don't care. I will feel more comfortable when he's gone, but at least until then things should be much calmer.

You sound as miserable as we are, that I wrote in the previous post. I know they all suggested we call the police, but this guy is a maniac, the management knows and we have called the police, but unless the wife does something about her husband, we can't press charges. I just wanted to say that I sympathize with you regarding unrelenting noise and we too have pondered about just forgoing our deposit and getting the heck out of here. We are planning on buying a house and it is in the works so once you know an end is in sight, the noise seems to not be so annoying. We deal with the same things, it seems that everything these people pick up, they drop, our ceiling fans shake, our pictures get all crooked from all the stomping, banging and they too don't know how to just close a front door, they must slam it as hard as possible and then thunder up the stairs. I never understood why people with kids would even think to live upstairs, knowing that they obviously are going to have a hard time respecting people below, but that is just me thinking that people care.......lol Best of luck to you, and yes, I would probably pack up, tell my friend I was sorry but I cannot live this way and chuck the security. I don't know what state you are in but in my state if you have made reasonable attempts to settle problems in an apt and to no avail, management cannot sue you for the remainder of the lease. Best wishes, angel

Hi, I know it's been 8 months since you folks were discussing this, but hopefully one of you who seems to know these systems and their components will happen to see this follow-up --- your discussion was the best I've seen, and I'm hoping one of you can offer some ideas about my gurgling system. I've bled all three loops in my system, both by doing what one plumber who worked on the system a few years ago called a "power purge" (hook up a garden hose to the drain valve for each loop and let water flow at full volume through the loop until the water flows smoothly, i.e. no more sputters) as well as using the bleeder valves in each loop. When I use the bleeders, no air sputters out, making me think I have all the air out of the loops. But when the pump first kicks on in the morning, you'd think we were in a sub filling our dive chambers. The sound of water flowing in the pipes sounds like the system is empty and being charged. The system did not have this problem last winter, but I drained it recently because I moved one of the baseboard radiators. Having read all the earlier comments in this thread, I have an idea I'd like to run past people, but of course, I'm open to anything else anyone has to offer. As it is, my Extrol is installed at the end of a dead end extension, contrary to the installation guidelines printed on the label. The reason I initially doubted that that's the problem is that the Extrol was that way last winter and the system was fine. However, the one possibility I'm wondering about is whether, when I drained the system a few weeks ago, too much air got up in the pipe that leads up to the Extrol, causing something like this to happen: after the system has been on a while, the air compresses up in the pipe that leads to the Extrol, and the system quiets down, but when the system is off for a while and the pressure in the system drops (because the boiler's not firing, i.e. overnight when we turn down the heat), the air de-compresses and pushes back down into the feed to the loops, thus causing a significant amount of gurgling when the pump first starts to push water through the loops; once the air has circulated back around to the tee that leads to the Extrol, the air is eventually all captured back up in the Extrol (and the pipe leading to it) and stays compressed there until the system pressure drops low enough to allow it back out of the pipe into the circulation feed. Sounds completely whacked, I know, but I'm at a loss for how the bleeders can stream completely air-free water, i.e. no sputters whatsoever, but every morning, it sounds like there are huge air pockets in the pipes getting pushed room by room through the loop --- and then it stops. Any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks, Mark