Light and noise are the two Nairobi complaints hosts never see coming

Hosts inspect their apartments at eleven in the morning on a weekday. Guests experience them at five in the morning on a Sunday. Almost every light and noise problem in a Nairobi short let is invisible at the hour the owner visits, which is why they end up being reported by a stranger in public.

The light problem

Nairobi sits on the equator. Sunrise is around the same early hour all year and it arrives without the long gradual dawn people from higher latitudes are used to. It is dark and then it is bright.

• Blackout curtains in every bedroom, not blackout blinds with a gap round the edge. This is the fix and it is inexpensive
• Fit them wider and taller than the window, because light comes round the sides. A curtain the exact size of the frame leaves two bright vertical stripes across the bed
• Check the overlap in the middle, where the two panels meet. Overlap them properly
• Deal with the standby lights. The television, the router, the air conditioner and the extension lead all glow. Cover them or move them out of the bedroom
• Security lighting outside is often the real culprit and it runs all night. Heavy curtains, or in the worst cases a conversation with the building

Fitting the curtain to the window instead of the wall is the single most common furnishing mistake in Nairobi, and it puts two stripes of sunrise across the bed.

The noise problem

Nairobi has a specific set of noises, and knowing which one you have determines whether it is fixable.

• The building generator, which starts at every outage and is loud if your unit is near it. Not fixable from inside. Disclose it
• Construction, which starts early and is a genuine feature of the fast growing suburbs. Temporary in principle and often long lived in practice. Disclose it while it lasts
• Bars and clubs, which in parts of Kilimani and Westlands run until very late at weekends. Not fixable and highly location specific. Disclose it, and be honest about which nights
• Traffic and matatus on a main road. Partly fixable with heavier curtains and window seals
• The lift shaft, the water pump and the corridor, if your unit backs onto them. Worth knowing before you buy
• Other residents. Nothing to be done, and it is normal apartment living everywhere

What actually helps

• Heavy lined curtains, which do useful work on both light and noise at once. The best value purchase in this article
• Seals on windows and under the door, cheap, and effective against the general wash of street noise
• Soft surfaces. Rugs, upholstery and curtains stop a tiled Nairobi apartment behaving like an echo chamber, which makes every internal sound worse
• A fan in the bedroom, which many guests use as white noise regardless of the temperature
• Earplugs in the bedside drawer. Slightly apologetic and genuinely appreciated where there is a known noise you cannot fix
• Choosing the quieter bedroom as the main one, if the layout allows. Free, and hosts rarely consider it

Test it the way a guest experiences it

Spend a night in the apartment before you list it, and specifically a weekend night. You will learn more in one night than in ten daytime inspections.

• What wakes you, and at what time
• Whether the bedroom is actually dark
• Whether there is a mosquito, which there usually is
• What the street sounds like after eleven
• Whether the fridge, the lift or the pump is audible from the bed

More on the bedroom as a whole in why the mattress is the most expensive thing to get wrong.

How Goldstay handles it

We check light and noise before listing rather than after the first review, fit blackout curtains to the wall rather than the window, and state known noise in the listing. Where a building level noise cannot be solved, we price and describe the unit accordingly instead of hoping guests do not notice.

If you would rather not run any of this yourself, it is what our Airbnb management service in Nairobi exists to do.

Related reading: how to get from 4.6 to 4.9 and whether air conditioning is worth it.