Downstairs Neighbour Keeps Banging. Need advice.

I just need some advice on how to proceed with this situation.

I totally understand that living in an apartment comes with its pros and cons. One of the cons is that you are living with multiple people/families besides your unit, on top of your unit, below your unit, basically there are people everywhere around you. And I understand the importance of doing your best to be reasonable with your sound levels.

My floor is a very loud floor, some play loud music, some talk really loud and some have dogs. You can’t hear them within our unit but if you were to go open the door, you will hear it all.

I don’t complain because for majority of the time, it’s only during day time and not sleeping hours and again, I understand that my living space is surrounding with other people’s living space.

Although, my downstairs neighbours don’t seem too keen with us making the SLIGHTEST noise. They bang on their ceiling when we open our dishwasher to load or unload dishes, when we open our closet sliding doors to put our outdoor shoes in, when my husband taps the sink drain catcher in the garbage can to get rid of the food that was caught, when my baby plays in his crib and makes tapping motions on the rails. The list goes on and on and on.

I’m just living my life and I’m tired of having to try to live in silence worried that they might complain to management. We have bought carpets, felt pads for our dining chairs, foam mats for our baby’s play pen area, we have tried to ensure we make the least amount of noise but I feel like this is overkill with the banging for regular day to day noises especially because it’s only during day time hours.

We also live in the heart of downtown and there is constant noise due to sirens, traffic, construction, etc. and you can hear this all even if your balcony doors are closed…and the noise outside is way louder than the noise we make. So I don’t see what’s the problem?

Am I missing anything? Is this really too much noise? What do I say when they come up to ask to keep it down?

Funny side note: we had maintenance over to fix our radiator and he was making a lot of noise and we heard our downstairs neighbours banging, we didn’t tell our maintenance to keep it down because we wanted them to come up and see that it wasn’t our fault this time and that there are times where the noise is out of our control. Once the maintenance was done, we heard them come up the stairs and we knew they saw the maintenance outside our room because they made small talk and didn’t bother knocking on our doors anymore.