Down the hall, your 10-year-old practices saxophone. In the garage, your husband fires up his table saw. The racket has the artwork on the walls jiggling.Wouldn’t it be great if you could muffle all that noise? By soundproofing your walls, you’ll gain peace and quiet, and restore a little sanity to your household.To quiet household noise, you’ll need to reduce vibrations, plug sound leaks, and absorb sounds.Deadening those vibrations is best done with heavy, dense materials that stop noise in its tracks.When it comes to heavy, brick and stone are great but impractical for retrofitting your interior walls. The easiest strategy is to add a second layer of drywall to build up a thick, sound-deadening barrier.You don’t have to add drywall everywhere — you can isolate the noisy room (kid’s saxophone) or the quiet room (your reading nook).You’ll have to refinish and repaint your new drywall, and probably extend electrical outlets and switch boxes, but those are relatively easy and inexpensive DIY projects.
As an extra defense, separate the two layers of drywall with 3/8-inch-thick beads of acoustical caulk ($9-$20 for 28-oz. tube). The caulk deadens vibrations that try to travel from one layer of drywall to the other.Made especially for noise control, mass-loaded vinyl (MLV) is a flexible material that comes in 4-foot-wide rolls. It’s made to hang on walls or install on floors to help deaden sounds. Sandwich it between layers of drywall to greatly reduce sound transmission through walls.A 15-foot-long roll of 1/8-inch-thick MLV (60 sq. ft.) is $80-$110. It’s heavy, so if you buy it online, expect to pay another $40-$50 for shipping.“Sound is like water,” says Josh Kernan of Westside Drywall in Hubbard, Ore., noting that anywhere water can leak through — cracks and openings — sound can get through, too.To stop leaking sound, use acoustical caulk to plug holes and gaps around:Add sweeps ($6–$14) to the bottoms of doors and weatherstripping to door frames.Acoustic panels absorb sounds before they can bounce off walls and ceilings.
They’re made to improve the sound inside a room, such as a home theater, but they’re also helpful in reducing sound transmission through walls.Made of porous expanded polypropylene (PEPP), panels come in a variety of sizes and thicknesses. Most types for home use are covered in fabrics with dozens of colors to choose from. Some manufacturers offer custom-printed fabrics that turn your sound blocking panel into a piece of wall art: Send in a digital photo, and they’ll reproduce it on your panel.Panels attach with clips or Velcro, and installation is an easy DIY job. A standard 2-by-2-foot panel is $25-$30.Adding soft items to rooms — rugs, carpets, drapes, potted plants — helps reduce vibrations and ambient noise.Related: Are Soundproof Windows Worth the Money?Sound-deadening duct wrap quiets noisy ducts and adds thermal insulation. A 4-by-30-foot roll of 1-inch-thick wrap is $50.A solid core interior door ($60–$80) absorbs sound better than a hollow-core door. Add a sweep to cut airborne sound.
Soundproofing products often come with a Sound Transmission Class (STC) rating. STC is a measure of how many decibels of sound reduction a product provides. The higher the STC rating, the better. An improvement of 10 STC makes the noise seem like it’s been cut in half. On the other hand, a rating difference of 3 STC or less is nearly imperceptible — worth knowing when comparing products.MASTERCRAFT doors are garbage! About five years ago my wife and I had an addition put onto our home. The builder used a MasterCraft exterior door for the entrance. It is wooden with a metal clad four panel and two lite. The lites have both completely seperated from the door allowing cold, heat, bees and any other possible invader to enter our home. I'm looking for a way to repair the door as I can't afford to replace it due to finances. If you have any ideas please share them with me. Disgusted esp if it's American-made. All 5 of our BRAND NEW mastercrap french doors leaked (seals broke on the inside)...so horribly... rain ran down into the drywall & foundation.
We HATE mastercraft products. Menards does not address the situation and could care less...passes the buck to Midwest Manufacturing. I will NEVER buy Mastercraft again. Spread the word to save others pocketbooks! See Pic of water pouring in from the interior side of the door! How in the heck does that happen?! 1 2 3 NEXT YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE... 7 Ways to Bring the Outdoors In 15 Old House Features We Shouldn't Abandon 13 Lazy Cleaning Tricks for a Spotless Home Laundry Room Ideas to Knock Your Socks Off Insanely Easy 60-Minute Home Improvements 12 Sheds You Could Live (or Work) In Assembly Required: 15 DIY Kit Homes 7 House Sounds You Never Want to Ignore 10 Surprisingly Simple Woodworking Projects Worth It: 8 Renovations That Pay You Back Organize Your Life with 12 Dollar-Store Buys 9 Totally Amazing Mobile Home Makeovers Don't Make These 7 Mistakes in Small Spaces 20 Sneaky Storage Ideas 15 Totally Unexpected DIY Flooring Alternatives
7 Easy Budget-Friendly Backyard Makeovers 10 Closet Cures That Cost Less Than $100 11 Easy DIY Projects to Declutter Your Home 19 "Zero Dollar" Garden Hacks 10 Killproof Plants for a No-Effort Landscape 9 Insanely Easy 1-Hour Backyard Projects Post a reply as Photo must be in JPG, GIF or PNG format and less than 5MB. Sign up or log in to customize your list. Here's how it works: Anybody can ask a question The best answers are voted up and rise to the top Changing out interior doors in house. Going from brown crap to white 6 panel. I have two hinges on each door. Would like to buy new door with predrilled knob hole, cut it down correctly to size, and then attach hinges to it. Only issue I have so far is not really sure how I should cut out for the hinges. I have read use a chisel. I am fine with that but do see how I can be even going across. Do you have access to a router? You'll save yourself a huge amount of time if you buy a hinge mortise template (like this one from HD) and use the router to cut out the mortises:
They attach temporarily onto the edge of the door, and you use the router in the large opening to cut to the correct depth. Once you're done, take the template off the door and screw in the hinge plates. I would recommend against buying pre-drilled as it probably won't match up with the existing jamb holes. I recently replaced two doors, and at ~$10 found this to be the economical solution: It comes with two hole saws, a latch template, strike template, hinge template and a router bit for your drill or router if you have one. The hinge and strike plate templates work with the router bit to create the edges of the mortices. Then chiseling out the interior is dead easy. When I mounted my doors, I removed the old ones and transfered all measurements to to the new ones. I cut the bottom to size with a table saw, and dry fit the blank before doing anything else. Templates work fine, but only if they match the hinges you are using. This can be a problem with non-standard or old hinges, or even different manufacturers.
Also, matching the hinge locations accurately just by measuring can be a time-consuming challenge. You can do it this way without templates. Assume the old hinges are still screwed into the jamb, but the old door is gone. Scrape off any paint remaining on the edges of the hinge leaves that are going on the new door. Screw the new door onto the old hinges before cutting the hinge gains, using one screw in each hinge leaf into the door. Get it's vertical location, fit to the (possibly out of square) header jamb and inset to the stop right. You may or may not be able to close it all the way because the hinge gains are not cut out on the door yet. If you need to reposition a small amount, it's often easier use another of the screw holes not already used. When everything looks good, use a sharp utility knife to cut around the hinge leaves on the door. You can knife down a little deeper than the thickness of the leaf, and it's easy to judge this depth by the penetration of the utility blade.
You often need to stroke the blade in several times to get sufficient depth. Now unscrew the door, and chisel or freehand rout most of the wood from the centre of the hinge gain, staying away from the perimeter that is defined by the utility knife cut at least 1/8". The remaining wood can be easily pried out with a chisel or even a utility knife by hand. Your hinges will fit perfectly, and you don't have to do anything to the jamb side at all. Advanced users will make a light utility blade cut to define the hinge location, then remove the door and knife in the edges slightly smaller than the knife line indicates, on a slight angle to undercut outwards. This gives a really tight fit of the leaf to the gain, nice if the doors are natural finish, and you can't hide anything with paint :) Sign up or log in Sign up using Google Sign up using Email and Password Post as a guest By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service. Not the answer you're looking for?