Noisy vacation rental next-door forced Healdsburg couple into $200,000 remodel

Betsy Sliney can tell you about vacation rental hell.

The Fitch Mountain resident and her husband live next to a vacation rental, which she compares to having a frat house for a neighbor.

A stream of a half-dozen or more strangers regularly show up for a couple days, ready to have some fun in Wine Country, to stay in a house overlooking the Russian River, with a hot tub on the deck. Maybe it’s a bachelor or bachelorette party, a 30th or 40th birthday celebration, people attending a wedding or a family get-together.

“They are on vacation. They are partying - loud, raucous behavior. They’re not necessarily bad or rowdy people,” said Sliney, who works as a software engineer. “It’s different behavior and it can be any night of the week.”

Even groups of women organized as a “book club” can shatter the peace and quiet.

“We cringe. They squeal all weekend,” Sliney said.

The vacation rental started up about 10 years ago. Sliney and her husband got little satisfaction when they complained to the homeowner or the county about the noise and parking problems it created on their narrow road, just outside Healdsburg city limits.

“At the time there were no regulations,” she said of county oversight. Healdsburg prohibits vacation rentals in residential neighborhoods.

The owners of the vacation rental, who also own several others nearby, according to Sliney, advised the couple to move if they didn’t like it.

About five years ago, they considered leaving.

“It had reached a point where there were many, many nights a week of not being able to live in our house,” Sliney said. “We couldn’t sleep because this party was going on next door.”

It didn’t help that Sliney’s husband, Matt Norelli, is a winemaker whose work during harvest entails early hours and late nights, when grabbing some sleep becomes all the more important.

But buying another house in Sonoma County seemed prohibitively expensive. So instead, they decided to remodel, to shut out the noise.

Roughly $200,000 later, they have a relatively sound-proof home with new insulation and double-pane windows. They knocked down their old bedroom, turned it into a deck, and added a bedroom in another location of the house.

“It was cheaper than moving,” Sliney said.

The couple hasn’t noticed much noise since then.

The county in recent years also has imposed noise standards and other rules for vacation rentals, ranging from the number of visitors to the parking required.

But Sliney said there is still an ongoing parking problem, especially when some of the vacation-rental guests show up with a half-dozen cars or more.

“Parking is extremely limited. It’s a constant battle,” she said “We can’t remodel our way out of that.”

The county’s Permit Resource and Management Department website has an area for the public to log complaints against vacation rentals, and Sliney does so periodically.

“I’ve never gotten feedback. I don’t know if it vanishes into thin air,” she said.