Spending the extra money to soundproof your new space will be extremely valuable in the long run. Not only will it render the room more user-friendly, it will increase the value of your home.
If you live in a condo or any other multi-family dwelling, uncontrolled noise transfer can keep you up at night or distract your during the day while you’re trying to converse, watch TV, read a book or work at your computer.
If you live in an apartment, you’ll need your landlord’s permission to carry out any kind of soundproof construction – most solutions are permanent.
Maximizing Your Soundproof Construction Effort
If you don’t have a lot of money to invest in soundproofing, or can’t see the value of spending your money on someone else’s property, simply decide which room the soundproof construction will be of most use. Once you get your first good night’s sleep in an acoustically treated bedroom, protected from early morning traffic and the late-night partying upstairs, you'll wonder why you put the project off for so long!
If you don’t have a problem sleeping at night, but are facing constant distractions when you work from home during the day, then using soundproof construction to turn a room into a home office could be a good idea.
Soundproof Construction Tips
You can minimize the cost of soundproof construction by taking note of the following tips.
Carefully consider your choice of doors for soundproof construction – and don’t forget about gaps beneath doors. Nearly all completely soundproof doors are extremely heavy and may require their frames to be reinforced. Also, if a 1/4-inch gap is left beneath a door, 60 percent of the sound in any given space will escape.
Don’t forget about windows. You can reduce as much as 90% of the exterior noise entering your home simply by installing soundproof window inserts over your existing ones.
This is in addition to the soundproofing for walls, soundproofing for ceilings, and soundproofing for floors that will assist in your soundproofing construction project.