Good Sound Abatement Walls Make Good Neighbors

Our house sits at the summit of a small hill on a pipestem. A pipestem, for those not in the know, is a long shared driveway, off which other houses have smaller driveways that belong to them. Sometimes they're also called private drives. Regardless, our house is at the top of the pipestem that then continues down a steepish hill to four other houses.

To one side of our house is a wooded strip separating us from some of the neighbor's houses (it's maybe 3 trees deep, it's not like you can't see the other houses). To the other side is a larger conservation area that is actually rather densely forested, with a runoff creek flowing through the bottom. The effect of these two treed areas is something like a funnel, apparently. A funnel that points up the hill.

And so it is that periodically, and only either late at night or very early in the morning, one or two of the neighbors comes home (or heads out for the day) with their car radios booming.

Did I mention that all our bedrooms are above the rooflines of any other houses on the pipestem due to the hill?

You can probably imagine just how well that works for remaining asleep when the boom-boom starts. Honestly, sometimes it's so loud I can make out some of the lyrics to whatever they're enjoying. Now, I can, most of the time, roll over and go back to sleep. The small one...not so much.

And so it was that I was awakened this morning at 5am to the thud thud of early morning bass followed by a revving engine. Both eventually faded off down the street. I held my breath, waiting to see if possibly he had slept through it. But no such luck. Very soon after I heard his door open and him flop to the floor by his gate, calling for me.

I put him back in bed, but I knew. I knew that being up that close to 7 was going to make it impossible for me to get back to sleep. I was not wrong. Tim's alarm went off around 5:45. Then the kiddo and I repeated the process at 6:10. Then again at 6:40. At 6:56 I gave up when he was up again. Because that really is close enough to 7.

I'd really like some sort of bubble that we could snap around the house at bedtime and remove in the morning that reflected all noises back to the creator of said noise and, oh I don't know, amplify it by 100. Cause I'm tired and feeling vindictive.

Either that, or it's one checkmark in the "Move to the Country" pro list.