Preparing for Mom

With Mom's permission, Hank Hartung's work of fine art is now hanging in our home. I'll be in Morton on the 8th and 9th to manage the movers and attend the close of her house sale. We'll return to MO right after the close, so by mid-afternoon on the 9th, we'll have new permanent resident. The plans for the basement are largely complete. She and Ellen will do what women love to do, namely shop for everything from flooring to light fixtures.

The only thing I have left on those plans is to research sound deadening techniques, so Mom doesn't have to listen to the tread of doom when someone walks across the main floor. I'm the bottleneck now. Even the builder is waiting on me to decide how I want to approach this problem. It's an interesting challenge made more difficult by our hardwood floor on the main level. In my reading so far, I've learned that sound travels through the wood joists and studs. Since our floors are all hard surfaces directly attached to the structure, it's as if we had installed an amplifier. You can even hear the dog walk for pity's sake. The theoretical goal is to eliminate any connection between the ceiling of the basement and the upper level. Sure, a suspended ceiling with insulation is pretty much required for that, but we can't use a suspended ceiling everywhere, plus the ceiling has to attach to something, and those attach points represent a sound highway. How much should I really spend on this, and if we don't thoroughly do the job, will those touch points nullify the investment we'll make for the rest of the ceiling? I don't know the answers yet.

We plan to put a media room in the basement, although it won't be outfitted for likely quite some time. We'll use this construction phase to build it out though, and I do believe I've figured out at least the walls for that. There are extremely expensive approaches for sound control in media rooms that would be really cool to do, but not affordable for us. The simplest and nearly just as effective way to go about it is to use a 2 x 6 as the baseplate for the framing and then stagger the studs on each side so that the framing members of one wall do not pass through and touch the drywall or framing members of the other. That interrupts the sound highway. The voids between the studs are then packed tight with insulation. While more expensive than a standard wall, this looks to be much more cost effective than the manufactured solutions out there, although likely not as soundproof.

I'll continue to post what I learn on this subject in the event anyone is interested in doing something similar. Thoughts and ideas are very welcome, so if you've used a technique that works, I'd love to hear about it.