There was a lot of noise transfer at Union Hill. It was so high that the lower neighbors wanted someone they knew to move in, so they would not feel embarrassed to ask them to be quiet. I did not think about soundproofing when we did the ceiling or floor work in the middle apartment… for some reason I always think about soundproofing after the fact! If I wanted to reduce the noise transfer between the apartments, my only options were soundproofing methods that could be done after construction was complete.
There were a few reasons why sound transfer was particularly high in this apartment:
- We removed carpet and installed laminate planks. The sound just echoed in the empty apartment.
- At one point, the house had a furnace and duct work. Although the prior owners removed the furnace, the ducts remained, transferring noise between apartments.
- There is a door off the kitchen that goes to a stairwell. The stairs lead to the main entrance of the downstairs apartment, but the middle apartment has no reason to use it. We replaced this door, and instead of replacing it with an external door which would have blocked more sound, I chose a solid-core interior door. An exterior door seemed like overkill, but the interior door did not block enough of the sound. At times, we could hear full conversations between the lower tenants.
Sometimes the best answer is the easiest, as it was for us in this case. First, we removed all the blinds in the apartment and installed curtains. This accomplished two things – it allowed us to repair the wood trim on the windows, and it absorbed some of the sound in the apartment. Next, we added rugs. We’ve always included rug clauses in our leases, but they are hard to enforce. Tenants aren’t incentivized to use them. We added neutral rugs and rug pads in all the main living spaces, and the difference was immediate. The downstairs tenants noticed it too!
The other thing we did was add soundproof weather stripping to the door off the kitchen. I had tried regular weather stripping, but you could still hear voices from the stairwell. Once I installed the new kind, I could barely hear voices. This stuff works great! If the downstairs tenants were in the hallway, you could hear faint voices, but they were muffled.
Unfortunately, there is still noise coming from the apartment above. As I mentioned above, there are things that I should have done.
- Soundproof the ceiling: We added a finish to the ceiling when we fireproofed between floors. We should have made sure that we used a soundproofing product like green glue in this process. That could have helped reduce the noise from upstairs.
- Add rugs upstairs: Like we did for the middle unit, we will order rugs for the upstairs apartment to dampen voices and reduce foot traffic.
