Our old house had its share of irritating and unpleasant and downright unsettling noises. Our old fridge had some sort of short in the electrical panel that regulated the temperature, and would utter random musical trills at odd moments throughout the day. We never really knew what would set it off; sometimes it would be silent for weeks, other times there would be only minutes or seconds between its three-note plaintive bleat.
The neighbor whose fence backed up against our backyard had a dog who liked to bark every time he went outside. Every afternoon, the neighbor would let him out. And then he would bark persistently until she let him back in, which might be an hour or so. Sometimes his barks would be punctuated by her angry voice yelling at him to knock it off. Poor dog.
Occasionally, I would hear an ominous buzzing from somewhere in my bedroom walls. I was the only person who ever heard it. Only once did the exterminator find a nest of yellowjackets, but I did call him anxiously MANY times throughout the years.
It should be no surprise that our new house has its own symphony of noises. I’ve related some of them here – like the attack robin that has been body slamming our window all spring. And our doorbell, which had some sort of short in the wiring and would issue a loud buzzing at odd hours of the day and night. It took a trained electrician an ungodly amount of time to figure out how to fix it, but we did get a replacement doorbell that works and doesn’t wake us up with intermittent buzzing.
What DOES wake us up, however, is the hood fan in our kitchen. The kitchen in this house was one of the things I fell in love with when we first toured the place. It is huge, it has all of these top-of-the-line and beautiful appliances. The stove has a gorgeous vent hood above it.
However, the vent is suffering some sort of electrical short, and comes on by itself every so often. It did this in the early days when we moved in, but then stopped for several months. Every few months, it seems to recall that it’s broken, and starts up again. Often in the middle of the night. Our house has excellent acoustics, so even though it’s in the kitchen, I wake up immediately when it goes on in the middle of the night. Sometimes it will stay off for a few hours, sometimes only a few minutes.
Since I only just had the appliance repair person out here (to look at my ovens, which cost me $300 to learn that they heat appropriately even though that is not my experience with them), I am loathe to call him back to tell me it will cost several hundred/thousand dollars to fix the hood vent issue. So I have been trying stopgaps. With my dad’s help via email, I dismantled the components and cleaned them. This seemed to help for a few days and then the fan started coming on with renewed vengeance. The only thing that seems to help is turning off the power source at the breaker box, which “resets” it for awhile. We’ve had silence for more than a week now; how long will it last?
Our furnace also makes very odd noises. I’ve questioned the electrician, the HVAC person, and my dad about the noises and they all seem to think it’s a simple matter of the ducts expanding and contracting with the change in air temperature. I’ve mainly gotten used to the loud metallic rumbling and popping sounds; they do happen less frequently now that we use the air conditioner more than the heater.
Over Memorial Day weekend, during which we had a barbecue with my parents, we noticed a trilling sound coming from the trees. It was very charming and pastoral, a lovely summer sound. My mother thought it might be a tree frog. After my parents left and I went to bed, I noticed that whatever it was had set up camp directly outside my bedroom window. It was calling back and forth with a fellow critter and it was no longer charming – it was an ear-piercing squawk that cut through the silence at arrhythmic intervals so that my brain could not get used to it. At first I thought it was a racoon, because how could such a loud noise come from something as small as a frog? But then, after playing the racoon sounds at it to get it to LEAVE THE VICINITY, I realized the calls weren’t quite the same. I looked again for tree frog sounds and found this video, which is identical in pitch and cadence to the song of the frog who lives in my yard. Playing racoon sounds at it seems to help; apparently, racoons are the frog’s natural enemies.
The most unpleasant of the sounds is human, however. Our new next door neighbors suffered from a catastrophic house fire shortly before we moved in, and their house has been undergoing a complete renovation for the past year. Aside from the lovely port-a-potty in their driveway, the worst thing (for us) about this renovation is the presence of construction workers. They arrive SO EARLY, even on the weekends. But worst of all: one or more of them have a disturbing problem with either phlegm or morning nausea, and so the mornings are often punctuated by loogie hocking, retching, and vomiting sounds. IT IS A DELIGHT.
There was one Sunday morning when my husband and I were torn from our sleep at sixish by a noise. We both sat up and looked at each other with sleepy horror, certain that it was the sound of our child barfing in her bed. Fortunately for us, it was just the construction people, exorcising whatever demons they seem to bring to work with them.