Noisy house

I like my house. Its spacious and quite nice I think. It is also very noisy. Irritatingly so. Its driving me mad.

I used to think we had too many boy racers with modified cars going about, until I decided to actually have a look as such noisy cars went past and see if I could see who it was. Almost always, it is perfectly normal everyday people in perfectly boring run of the mill runabouts driving cautiously round the blind bend.

I used to think everyone in the neighbourhood had annoyingly loud voices, until again I actually paid attention, and most are just normal.

I could go on, but the point is, I've come to the conclusion that my house somehow amplifies every noise.

We have double glazing, wall and loft insulation etc.

However now I have a theory. We have no carpets except in the lad's bedroom. Everywhere else its either laminate flooring or bare floor boards.

We have no curtains, instead we have light fabric blinds.

All of the interior doors are very light weight, mostly single glazed glass panel doors.

It was wife that pointed out, our house is as noisy as a house that's been cleared ready for redecorating. She's right, you know how everything seems much louder when you empty a room? That's like my whole house.

So, I guess I need to muffle it by getting heavy curtains instead of the blinds (which I hate anyway), maybe carpets, maybe ceiling tiles etc.

I can't afford to do it all in one go. Any ideas please on what is going to be the simplest/cheapest but most effective place to start?

I did consider drilling my ear drums out but decided against it after some careful consideration.

 

glad u decided against the ear drum drilling lol

If it were me, I'd start with the carpets. But that's probably because I hate bare floors in any room except the bathroom & kitchen

 

I can just suggest it depends from what kind of noise you want to extrude because different solutions work with different noises.

 

I don't know about the cheapest option but carpets will make a massive difference....

 

Before I put the sheep's wool insulation into this place it all turned up in girt bundles which filled most of the hall



Sorry, don't have a pic of the hall full of wool

Whole place smelt of sheep for a while, but when you went between the pallets, all sound was sucked out of the air.

We're right on a main road, but the traffic doesn't bother me apart from a farmer who drags a double roller up & down the road, shakes the entire building.

 

My bathroom seems noisey, ie. i can hear a lot of noise from the rest of the house in there, and i agree it is because i have sanded and varnished the floorboards. So, i am also considering a different flooring because of the noise levels. It may be nice, but not necessarily practical.

 

Ear plugs are very cost effective and I bet Scrungee knows where the cheapest ones are!!

 

Soft furnishings will reduce echo immediately. I suggest you start with curtains Clueless. Although not cheap, at this point it's cheaper than carpets. Lined curtains would be best and will give you extra insulation. You would also be wasting money on ceiling tiles, they won't make a difference.

My daughter has just had laminate layed in her kitchen and the difference in noise level is amazingly higher. Her dogs claws patter across it too.

With the exception of bedrooms and bathroom, all my interior doors ( seven of them)are wood and fully glazed like the one below, I also have a lot of windows, but these don't make the noise levels worse, so soft furnishings are what you need.

 

Rooms without damping=resonance and amplified noise and echoes.

You need to tame the hard surfaces and find where the " echoes " and resonances are. Easy to do, just stand and clap your hands in various areas of the room. The brighter, harder sounding clap is where your resonances and standing waves are. Rugs if not liking carpet will make a massive difference, as well as taming the expanse of glass, keep the blinds, but just go for slightly heavier material. Also, is it possible to move the sofas? You can add cushions too.

The emptier the rooms the more that Sound will bounce of the walls, floor, ceiling and windows. The fuller the room, the more the resonance will be damped. Even pictures on the walls where the resonance is bad will help and sound collects in the corners, so try and move furniture if you can there. Corners act like sound chambers so sound is amplified aking things seem louder!

 

We had a noisy house,we done all above etc, not much difference but better with carpets but it was still noisy, so the front garden we put up a fence and lots of shrubs to defuse the noise, still noisy, so i borrowed a noise metter and went looking for the noise,in the end the noise wasn't in the air, but it was traffic noise travelling through the ground, the house was build on the same seem of rock as the road,
At alot of expence, a digger and jack hammer and a lot of hard work we dug a trench through the seem of rock, peace and quite at last

 

Our house can echo too, because its stone and we have hard floors.
As already said, think about any soft furnishings. Carpets or rugs,curtains (they can be permanently hung to the sides of the windows and used with your blinds.) cushions and wall hangings. Tapestries were hung in castles don't forget.

 

We have always had carpets but when we moved temporarily to a rented last year with laminate floors we never realised just how noisy it could be. Just walking across the floor was noisy and everything echoed. Carpets do make a difference.

 

Thanks for the info folks. Much appreciated as always.

I've been doing some more figuring out, and there's a few things going on.

Firstly, I think my ears are becoming too sensitive. I always had extra sensitive hearing, but then I went a bit deaf when I lived away in Sheffield. Coming back I didn't particularly notice, until about a week ago when we went to Sheffield for a couple of days. The noise of the city is just immense. I think having been out of it for a while, maybe my hearing sensitivity has come back, to the point where every sound seems loud. The wife doesn't seem to think there's much of a problem, so part of it must be me.

I'm definitely going to make the changes in the house that we've said too though. Obviously a bit at a time because I'm not made of money A strange think I've noticed is that all the noise seems to come from the windows. At first that sounds obvious, until I say that if I'm in the bathroom (the back of the house) and a car goes past the front, it sounds like the car has just driven across my back garden. That's especially odd because the layout of the houses is such that there is no road behind our house for about 100 yards, and there's another row of houses before you get to the road (the gardens go back to back). It seems then that the windows are amplifying the sound.

Then there's the church hall next door. Between us and that, in there is a little alley, and a distinct lack of shrubs (I'm already onto that). I was out the back today, when I heard petrol power tools start up. The noise seemed to be coming from down the street, in the direction of the church. Curious, I went through our house to have a look out the front. Would you believe it, it was directly across the road from us, so when I'd heard it, our house was between me and the source of the noise, yet it sounded like it was coming from a different angle. I.e. it was reflecting off the church hall. That's good, as it tells me that a lot of the neighbourhood noise that makes its way to my ear drums, does so via the back garden. This is good because I've always planned on growing stuff along the 'jail perimiter' (a massive steel bar fence that the church erected along our mutual boundary) just to mask the view (the church hall is a prefab, and is in somewhat disrepair). This will hopefully also absorb some of the reflected sound.