My house is just the opposite. There is so much steel and concrete in it that a WRT54GL router or a cordless phone won't reach from one room to another.

The ceilings/floors are 14" steel-reinforced [not just rebar but heavy I-beams] concrete and the walls are similarly constructed. It was a big shock to the man who installed a split A/C system last year when he found out how difficult it was to make a three-inch hole through an outside wall for the coolant and drain lines.

The man who built the house is an engineer by education, a contractor by avocation, and lived in the house for six years before selling it to me. He had this idea that a house should be built really strong, and it is!

The downside is that the entire house is a sounding board. There is NO wood construction, it is all concrete and masonry and steel, and if someone in the basement scrapes a chair moving away from the table, I will hear it quite plainly on the fourth floor. No big deal, after a while I don't even notice, and there is so much other noise going on around here... even though the town square is a kilometer [almost exactly, give or take 10 meters] away, because of the layout of the streets and the shape of the arroyos on the hill where I live, when they have a concert I can hear every note. Twelve times a day (more on Sundays) the bells in the big church tower ring out the call to Mass, three calls for each. Religious festivals (this is Mexico; there are lots of festivals) are accompanied by cohetes. These are rockets that go about 400 feet in the air then explode with enough violence to rattle my sliding glass doors. By common understanding they don't start these before six in the morning, and they rarely shoot them off much after midnight. Some days the house will be rocked by more than 100 such explosions. Another aspect of the religious celebrations involves roving mariachi bands that wander the neighborhoods, sometimes starting at six am. Most of them don't play very well, but they make up for it with volume. Lots of houses in the neighborhood keep chickens, and forget the old wives tale about roosters crowing at sunup. These babies crow 24 hours a day! Somewhere about two blocks east of me someone has a donkey that breaks out into donkey-song four or five times a day at any time of day or night. Oh, and let's not forget the guy who is teaching himself how to play the trombone. He's over on the next block and isn't allowed to play it inside the house, so he goes out and stands on his [flat] roof to practice. Six days a week, regular as clockwork, he serenades the neighborhood for an hour or so starting at 4 pm. He started out as a rank beginner and over the past few months has gotten substantially better at it. Closer to home (like five feet from my picture windows) I usually have twenty or thirty hummingbirds attacking the bird feeders. In terms of noise per cubic inch of body size, they're probably at the top of the heap.

And you know what? I love every bit of it! In my 68 years I have never enjoyed living anywhere as much as I enjoy it here.

tanstaafl.