There's not much I can do about people upstairs, but I do hear some sound from downstairs and I am looking into something to improve that situation. My next project will be to replace the old wall-to-wall carpet and with new floors and I was about to move ahead with installation of a hardwood floor. Then one day I realized I was tired of listening to the crying baby downstairs, and tired of being woken up by the vibrations when they run up the stairs from their basement to their main floor early in the morning. So I'm looking into cork floors now. I started the online research last week and went to a few stores yesterday. There aren't as many color choices so I will probably end up with something a bit darker than I had originally chosen for the hardwood floor. And I know it won't completely solve the noise problems. But it should help, and it should also be warmer for my cold feet in the winter.

One good thing is that I don't have noise problems from the people on either side of me. I can only hear sounds from one of them if there's lots of noise in their kitchen, like people talking very loudly, and that rarely happens. From the townhouse on the other side I can hear one of the dogs barking, but it's a well-trained dog so it's not much of a problem, and I don't hear any other sounds.

The flooring stores I went to yesterday were in the suburbs just northwest of DC. The area where I live got about 20" of snow, while the suburbs north and west got 30ish inches. The area I was in yesterday wasn't in the hardest-hit area but they definitely had bigger snow piles than we have here. The manager at one of the stores told me that the county was piling lots of snow in a lot down the road from his store, giant piles, like 30 feet high. He mentioned that when it melts it will run off into Rock Creek which runs through a big park in DC, and it won't be clean water so not good for the environment. That's another side to snow and ice in our area -- tons of salt ends up in the rivers and eventually in the Chesapeake Bay.