You've got me started now - rant alert - I'm in a flat. I have had the people at the top of the building doing a kitchen and bathroom, workmen passing our front door every time they go upstairs, and ruining the stair coverings. Then another flat upstairs did a total DIY renovation at the weekends and their holidays for a year. Then downstairs tore up floors with jackhammers to lay underfloor heating and relaid wooden block floor very noisily over several weeks. Then they sold that flat and the next lot ripped it all out and hammered the tiles off two bathrooms and a kitchen, and built a fully insulated studio in their garage behind the house - more than four months of multiple workmen, builders vans and lorries in all. Now that's done, we get complaints from downstairs that we walk across the floors too loudly and they can't bear the noise, it's ruining their lives because we're decorating, renovating our windows and laying a new floor. They display very negative body language when they see us, and they know we are trying to help by putting soundproofing down and changing a lot of other things - all at their request! They even complained at 9pm at night when I was tapping ice out of an ice tray. I've been invited downstairs to witness the 'terrible noise' while my son deliberately ran and stamped round slamming doors and shouting, I could barely hear him and it's nothing like as much as we get from upstairs because they have wooden floors! The downstairs neighbours say they can't hear our radio, music or TV but they can hear us talking, opening drawers (we have no ideas which drawers). I've always been able to turn off from noise, otherwise I'd not live in a flat in an old building, but not the constant criticism of our normal living. The previous occupants of the flat below us are shocked and say we really weren't noisy (they moved for more space, not because we were too loud, in fact, we get on fine with all the other neighbours). But, now I have to leave music on low in every room as background sound, just so we feel we can have a normal conversation that isn't overheard. After almost two years of complaints we are so fed up with having to creep around wondering when the next irate text will arrive that we're trying to move house now. We plan to keep our flat and rent it out for a few years, hoping the flat downstairs changes hands so we can move back in to ours. I almost feel I've been gaslighted over all this. Not sure how that responds to the OP, if at all, except to say there's really no absolute right to a quiet environment and yes, noise is a real health problem; at the same time people have to do work to buildings and by nature, it's noisy.