Noisy Neighbors
I bought a brownstone this summer and was surprised to move in and find that I can hear so much of what goes on in my neighbors houses (pipes, showers, TV, up and down stairs, singing, the vacuum etc…). I don’t really have a full scale renovation to do and therefore won’t be tearing down…
I bought a brownstone this summer and was surprised to move in and find that I can hear so much of what goes on in my neighbors houses (pipes, showers, TV, up and down stairs, singing, the vacuum etc…). I don’t really have a full scale renovation to do and therefore won’t be tearing down or putting up any new walls. Is there anything that I can do? Is my house extra loud? Or is this a we are all in the same boat, situation?
noise travels through openings. sounds like obvious info. but it’s not. you need to close those openings to get rid of the sound transmission. if you can’t close the openings between spaces because they are buried beneath whatever you have to put another barrier on top of it. air is an okay insulator, so right off the bat if you put up another wall or floor and leave some space you have a bit of an additional barrier as well. but odds are you need to also put in something that will insulate for sound like regular insualtion or something. you could rent an insulation blower and blow it in to the space you have created if you put up a new wall. i know you are reading this and saying forget it, i’m not losing sq. footage and putting up a new wall. okay then, try to find something else to use as a barrier then. like a curtain. but that has problems because it’s going to be open at the top unless you install it with one of those flush ceiling mount tracking systems and somehow get it to stay closed all the way on the bottom too. good luck.
Ah…noises from next door…party walls are only one brick thick in most places. We’ve heard some pretty nasty stuff coming through the walls, and there’s not much you can do about it without mortifying yourself by asking the neighbors to pipe down. If you’re buying a brownstone, pray that your neighbors are nice and quiet…or travel all the time…
We have the same problem, and like many of the first-time house-dwellers who moved from pre-war apts, we were stunned when we realized it. The problem has less to do with the walls and their thickness/insulation ( in our case, at least) and almost everything to do with the floors. The houses were built in tandem and the floor joists are continuous throughout the two houses. Therefore, sound resonates across the joists – almost like living in a giant acoustic guitar. The big solution is severing and re-hanging the floor joists, but that’s a gut-reno kind of deal. We plan to add insulation when we repair the ceiling on the ground floor. I’ve heard that a thin layer of rubber over the joists, then 3/4 ply, then new flooring ( our home has no sub-floors, just wide pine directly nailed to joists). Any thoughts?
Another thing to try is building out the walls- frame out a wall where the frame doesn’t touch the wall behind it, fill it with insulation/batting, and sheet rock. If you have plaster walls you can skimcoat the sheetrock… it’ll blend nicely.
I’d love to keep this thread going – we’ve gone to virtual war with our neighbors who appear to live like monks with only a transistor radio for entertainment and a shoe-free home. While we appreciate it, we have no plans to follow suit; we listen to music, watch TV and run the Hoover on occasion. So your thoughts would be appreciated.
Part of the problem is that while most of the length of the shared walls are 3 bricks thick, it gets down to one brick thick where the fireplaces are. That’s not much of a sound barrier!
We moved into a brownstone and were surprised to learn that our neighbor can here everything on OUR house, even though we hardly hear anything from her house. She was convinced that when the last owner renovated he had taken down plaster or walls or something, because she claims that after the renovation she could hear much more than before. We know that the owner did not do much at all to the walls, but we know that he did change the floor: He installed PERGO floors throughout. Near as we can tell this created a big change in the sound transmission. Working theory goes as follows: Once installed, the floor becomes a solid object and translates any sound across to the party walls and then into her house. In addition the floors make our spaces very “live” accoustically. Sound bounces around – you can hear everything, and it is very difficult to have any accoustical separation within the house.
Needless to say, new wood floors are high on the list of renovations.
Luckily we don’t have noisy neighbors but I’m still slightly surprised at how much we DO hear and I worry that they hear too much of us. But then it’s a bit of a myth that Victorian construction was so solid: yes, the finishes and detail are often wonderful but many houses were built quickly and cheaply on “spec”. Our GC managed to break the party walls on both sides of our house during our renovation — the walls were only one brick thick. When brownstones were going up, often small openings were left between adjacent houses to enable workmen to travel easily between them. They were called leprechaun holes and were only closed up when the houses were ready for final plastering. So I don’t think it’s that unusual you’re experiencing noise. When I visit friends who live in an 1850s London townhouse, I can hear the phone ring in their neighbor’s house.
I recently moved into a brownstone and am having the same problem, it’s quite a shock after living in a rock solid pre-war building. Someone posted about this recently, look in the archives. I was going to look up their recommendation — http://www.quietsolution.com
Are these people in the same building? If so, I think what you are experiencing is common. Are they in next door? If so, that’s rather unusual (especially the singing, vacuum, etc).