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I live in a high rise apartment, there are construction for renovation above and below me that I can do nothing about. My wife is 8 months pregnant we are about to have a baby. I'm afraid of all of this construction noise will disturb the child's sleep. The construction goes on during the day. It's pretty loud, both my wife and I wear ear plugs when at home. What can we do for our baby?

We downloaded a decibel measuring app, the noise seems to be at 75 decibels when they are drilling. Normal conversation is 60-70. But somehow this noise is so much more unbearable. I don't know, baby might not know the difference, but it is really annoying to us.

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    I'm wondering if he doesn't hear it already, and they probably sleep through it... it might be like hearing the mother's heartbeat when they come out. :)
    – anongoodnurse
    Commented Jul 24, 2015 at 6:10
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    @anongoodnurse maybe. If the mother is Godzilla. Otherwise, it may be just a tad louder :)
    – terdon
    Commented Jul 24, 2015 at 14:27
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    I would check with your municipality. Your results were quite close to the legal limit, and we don't know how reliably your measurement was.
    – aparente001
    Commented Jul 25, 2015 at 5:44
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    Normal conversation is 60-70 dB. I've found information such as "Upper 70s are annoyingly loud to some people.", which could explain your issues. But, I'd reiterate what answers say: your child will likely sleep through it. My boys have slept through cinema movies at that age, and those decibel levels can be 90-130 dB (which is insane).
    – user11394
    Commented Jul 26, 2015 at 16:06

3 Answers 3

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It would/will surprise you what baby will sleep through.

We have two, and they've always slept through stuff like (adult) neighbours jumping around playing Wii just on the other side of the wall, the house behind us that likes to light off fireworks any time of the day/night, noisy parents (us) upstairs with noisy grandparents/other company, dishes being clanged together, vacuuming outside their rooms,...

Baby's going to wake up for very few reasons early on:

1- food, often

2- made a mess, needs cleaned up

3- colic/gas/other similar, hopefully rarely

Both of you, on the other hand, I hate to say may have a hard time of it, since you're going to want to be able to hear baby.

Might want to get used to not having the earplugs in now, because like it or not, baby's going to want something at some point and be really loud about it if you don't respond fast enough :)

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  • especially a baby who is used to noise. Our 4 & 2 year sleeps through most things - they fell asleep DURING 4th of July fireworks (since it was very late).
    – Ida
    Commented Jul 27, 2015 at 17:26
  • Agreed. My infant can be napping in her bassinet in the living room, and I can run the vacuum cleaner under the bassinet. She never even stirs.
    – swilliams
    Commented Aug 5, 2015 at 15:53
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We started extensive renovations of our house with a 6 month old. This involved 15 months of destruction, construction, tradies arriving first thing, jackhammers, etc... Our kid coped fine, he just learned to sleep through the din.

Worse comes to worse, you can stick the baby in a pram and take him for a walk at sleep time. The downside is they kid may get used to sleeping in a moving pram; this can be a tricky habit to break.

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  • I would add that it may be unlikely for the infant to sleep through startling noises, such as hammering starting or a large item being dropped. But, if the noise persists after they've startled awake, they'll often adjust to it and stay asleep.
    – user11394
    Commented Jul 26, 2015 at 16:08
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I would suggest using another sound to block out the construction noise.

A lot of people use some kind of white noise device to help their babies sleep anyway even without excessive background noise. There are lots of ways to do this - there are special machines for it designed for this purpose but I don't think that's very necessary. It can just as easily be the noise from something else that's useful like a fan, humidifier, dehumidifier etc or you could try some soft music.

I haven't generally used white noise with my son but one time when I was staying in a hot country we had to use a fan and air conditioning. There was a lot of noise coming from the room next door but I found the fan and air conditioning blocked the other sounds well and helped me and my baby to sleep. A continuous sound is much easier to sleep to than one that stops and starts and changes.

A simple web search will tell you much more about this if you need more information. A lot of baby sleep sites recommend white noise.

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