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Anybody ever stayed in a block of flats?
linkinpark875
Posts: 29,703 Forum Member
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Anybody ever stayed in flats with a secure door entry? Is it usually quiet and do you see your neighbours often? I've looked at these houses to rent but ideally a front door is better.
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On the whole not much noise from neighbours but we can sometimes hear them as the flats are all "loft" style with wooden floors so if you shift furniture or walk across them in hard shoes it can be heard.
We're good friends with one set of our neighbours so see them all the time. The others are nice but we don't really see them all that often, just on "nodding" terms really.
You can get flats with there own front door but they are quite rare well in Scotland anyway maybe not down south. The only problem with flats is neighbours renting and people moving in and out all the time. Some renters can be great others a nightmare.
However, it does depend on the area & your neighbours I think, as with every where and every property. The only reason I'd never live in one is because I like houses, and I'd be really paranoid about the people below hearing me, and hearing the people above!
Awww got to disagree with you on this as i think your younger sister and mother are probably very nice and not horrible at all ;-)
I hated it, I hated that we were next to the communal door and people used to let it slam at all hours which used to disturb us and I hated lying in bed being able to hear the woman upstairs having a poo. Never again.
Yes, a lot of single people women in particular feel safer in a flat (a nice one, obviously; no one feels safer in a terrible, run-down block full of graffiti and needles on the stairs.) The down-side to really nice flats is obviously the service charges; there are some I know of where the service charges are £4000 a year, though the flats and gardens are lovely.
When my house was gutted by fire I was re-housed for six months in a third floor flat, and spent the entire 6 months reflecting that it would be impossible to escape through the window if the flat was on fire.
Personally I prefer to live in a house with acres of beautifully tended grounds, and spacious quarters for the servants.
What a daft place to re-house you! Hope you kept something heavy nearby to smash the window with. Sounds well scary.
Yes, flats can feel safer, especially if you're not on the ground/lower ground floor. You have to trust other people to keep the main door shut, however, which doesn't always happen.
So would your neighbours I expect.
We were lucky in that the management company were always on top of things, for example disposing of 3-piece-suits that people had just dumped in the communal bin area.
Biggest problem I actually faced was that there was a certain condition that could occur in the wastewater plumbing of the building - I think something like if 2 or more of the flats directly below me flushed their toilets at the same time, it would create enough suction in the downpipe to suck all the water out of the u-bend of one of my toilets, and then of course the place stinks of that "drain" smell until you can flush it again.
EEEK!
Perhaps they were jumping from this
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/tower-block-residents-rescued-from-blaze-6378006.html
I can't place where they are....obviously around The Flats*.
*not those sort of flats.....
I live in a small block of flats with secure door entry that was built on these principles
http://www.securedbydesign.com/professionals/index.aspx
Apparently it used to be the location of the most horrible council estate in the area - I only found this out when a cabbie refused to drive into my street "Sorry love ain't going in there, not safe".
I had to laugh when he finally did, he was like "Ooh it's all lovely now, where's the estate gone??" They flattened it, that's what.
I so wish Secured By Design had been in place in the 60s and 70s when they built all those hideous council estates in this city.
If you're not bothered by that then go for it.
If you can find a flat in a block where you have elderly neighbours that would be good. They are quiet and you have loads of people watching your flat 24/7.
Is it a council-owned building?
They have a habit of lumping all the "dead wood" in together so you can quite easily find yourself surrounded by arseholes.
It can be quite a pleasant little sub-community if your neighbours are all decent sorts but it can also be a nightmare if they're not.
If you can be bothered, I'd suggest knocking on a few of the doors and saying that you might be moving in and you were wondering what the building is like etc.
You don't have to pay much attention to their opinions but you can use the conversation to decide whether the people are arseholes or not.
Nope. I get zero noise from above, admittedly this is a new built and not a Victorian conversion (where noise issues can be horrendous). If I didn't know the young couple who live above me I would have naturally assumed their flat is unoccupied.
The whole building is concrete, glass and steel.
If I ever meet the architect of this place I'll happily buy him a beer for a job truly well done.