How to Soundproof a Room Inexpensively (What I Did at Our Summer House)
The summer house is supposed to be the quiet place.
That’s the idea anyway. You leave the city, you leave the noise, you arrive somewhere slower and more peaceful and you decompress for a few weeks before going back. That’s what I told myself every June for several years while sitting inside with the air conditioning on, listening to the girls running through the house, noise coming through the walls from outside, the neighbours two houses down who apparently communicate exclusively at high volume, and the general chaos of a summer house in a place where everyone has their windows and doors open because it’s thirty-eight degrees.
It wasn’t quiet. It was just a different kind of noise from the city.
The air conditioning made it worse in a specific way I hadn’t anticipated. With the doors and windows open at least the noise felt like it belonged to the outside. Once we closed everything up and turned the AC on, the noise that still came through felt more intrusive somehow. Like it had found its way in despite your best efforts and was now trapped in there with you.
I spent one particularly loud August afternoon reading about soundproofing and then the following September, after the season ended and the house was quiet in the way it only is when empty, I did something about it.
This is what I learned and what I actually did.
The honest thing about soundproofing nobody says clearly enough
You cannot make a room completely silent without spending serious money and doing serious structural work. If that’s what you’re looking for, nothing in this article will get you there.
What you can