Everyone deserves calm and quiet in their own home. But, often, that isn’t the case with many apartments and houses. If you’ve noisy neighbors, it can get downright annoying when they disturb your sleep or the ambiance you’ve set in your home. Sometimes, it can feel like the world is getting noisier day by day.
It is essential to have a quiet room to clear the thoughts, relax and have a good night’s sleep if needed. But soundproofing a room isn’t a walk in the park. This article will be looking at some of the best soundproofing methods one can implement in their home to make a room quieter.
7 Simple Ways to Soundproof a Room
The primary objective of soundproofing is to block out incoming sounds and to contain outgoing noise. You can’t expect to place a noise-canceling headphone all day long to have a day of peace. So, let’s look at some of the simple ways to soundproof a room. The list has been specially curated to make soundproofing easier and cost-effective.
Weather-Stripping The Door
One of the biggest problems with rooms is the interior door. The interior door is usually light and hollow compared to normal doors. This makes it an easier target for noise to pass right through to your room.
Moreover, there can be cracks and gaps in your door that can let sound in and out of the room. To properly soundproof rooms, you will have to close the gaps. You can use weather-stripping tape to cover the perimeter of the door and help seal the gaps and muffle the sounds coming in. Weather-stripping tapes are affordable, easy to install, and can form a very tight seal.
Use a Door Sweep
While trying to soundproof a room, one can’t ignore the enormous gap between the door and the floor. It can be the source of a major part of the noise coming in and blocked. An effective way to do this is to install door sweeps on the interior doors.
Door Sweeps are cheap soundproofing materials that can be installed on any door within a few minutes. Door Sweeps consists of a bag of soundproofing material that can be latched onto the bottom of the door, completely sealing and blocking out the bottom part of the door.
An added advantage is that it prevents the entry of insects and bugs into your home through the gap between the door and the floor.
Use Soundproofing Curtains
One of the weakest areas of a bedroom and a significant factor to remember while soundproofing rooms are the windows. You can invest in good soundproofing curtains to block out most of the noise coming in through your windows. Today, there are many soundproofing curtains available that can be selected to match the aesthetics of your home and have utility at the same time.
Soundproofing curtains are special curtains that are made of soundproofing materials with more mass than normal curtains. Moreover, these curtains tend to cling to the window and beyond the edges of the window to not show any gap for the sound to pass through.
Hang Acoustic Foam Panels
Acoustic Foam Panels are very efficient in blocking the sounds and are even used in professional recording studios to soundproof the walls. Acoustic foam can be used to soundproof home theaters or to soundproof your bedroom so that you can have a good night’s sleep.
Acoustic panels are available in all sizes and shapes and can be selected to match your room. Moreover, you can cut acoustic foam panels with an ordinary electric kitchen carving knife to meet the size requirements or make patterns to liven up your room.
Add Rugs or A Book Shelf
The key to soundproofing any room is to add more mass to it so that sound can get easily absorbed. You can add rugs to your floor to soundproof it from the downstairs neighbors. Rugs can also be a fashion statement and mask the sound of you walking around in your apartment.
If you have a shared wall with your neighbor, more focus should be given to the wall. A cost-effective method of soundproofing can be to build a bookshelf along the shared wall and fill it with books you’ve in your attic. It can absorb the noise coming through the walls, and you may even start reading some of those books.
Add Drywalls
Drywalls can be your go-to solution if you aim to reduce noise traveling from one room to another. They are versatile tools that can be added to the wall and even inside the layers of a wall. It provides a dense layer of soundproofing and can be attached to the walls using resilient channels. Drywalls consist of gypsum cores and can be used anywhere from home to an office.
Add White Noise
This may be one of the most unconventional methods of soundproofing on the list, but it works. You can now use soft sounds in your home and bedroom and cancel out the unwanted incoming noise of a frequency range. White noise systems are very effective and can transform any noisy environment into a quiet place. White noise machines can also be controlled via a smartphone and are very convenient.
Final Thoughts
In this article, we have seen some of the best methods to make a room quieter. We’ve used cost-effective solutions with the best value for money and selected methods that can be installed relatively easily.
It can get annoying if intrusive sounds ruin your peace every day. You can’t complain to your neighbor if your shared wall is too thin or there’s construction nearby. But, what you can do is to soundproof your room to have peace and a calming ambiance. You can use any or all of the methods mentioned above to have significant results.
