Living next to or above or below a neighbor who is clunking, clanking, yelling, or racing their toy fire truck across the floor at six in the morning is among the most maddening of New York City situations. Then there are the sirens, car alarms, honks, construction projects, and general ruckuses outside our windows at all hours. You can replace your regular windows with fancy soundproof ones or add extra drywall to internal walls — but those are both major, many-thousands-of-dollars renovations. Interior designers, acousticians, and DIY-ers spoke to Laura Fenton about the simpler, less expensive solutions that are worth a try.
First, have a delicate conversation.
Psychologist Arline Bronzaft, who has spent the past five decades researching the adverse health impacts of noise, is often called on to mediate between neighbors and believes in a careful, direct approach: “Do it nicely. Do it with some humor. Do it politely and decently. Sometimes a person’s not aware that they are loud.” It worked for Upper East Sider Melissa Shapiro, who says, “When my neighbors got a treadmill, it was so loud — the apartment literally shook.” She gently suggested the person upstairs come listen to the sound of the machine from below, which was enough to get them to add a shock-absorption mat that helped dramatically.
Offer to buy them a rug pad.
Unfortunately, there aren’t any DIY solutions to tuning out a noisy or lead-footed upstairs neighbor — covering the ceiling with felt won’t work — but Jim Keller, founder of Sondhus, which builds soundproof recording studios in the city, says a rug pad installed in the apartment above could absorb some of those structure-born vibrational noises. Keller recommends a high-quality pad made of foam, not rubber, and the thicker the better. He suggests a contractor-grade, eight-pound-density carpet pad, which is usually installed under wall-to-wall carpet.
Don’t tack up foam squares.
If you Google “How to soundproof an apartment,” you’re bound to find suggestions to put up egg-crate foam, but Keller says that’s not particularly effective — and it’s heinously ugly. For a more attractive sound-deadening solution, Whitney Parris-Lamb and Amanda Jesse, founders of the Brooklyn interior-design firm Jesse Parris-Lamb, once installed Nova cork tiles on the walls of a client’s office. Jesse says cork is lightweight and easy to cut, so a DIY installation is possible. It’s a fairly straightforward process of prepping the walls with primer, applying special adhesive to the cork, and sticking it up using a mallet. Worth it for the wall-to-wall pinboard you’ll get in the end.
If hallways are the issue, plug up the gaps around your door.
Use weather stripping or a door-seal kit around the sides and top of the door and install a sweep — a piece of material covering the gap at the bottom of a door that can help reduce noise. When Doug Armstrong, a film professional, installed a self-adhesive rubber sweep on the front door of his Midtown East apartment, it muffled the hallway sound enough to stop his dog from barking every time someone walked by.
Stop sound leaks from outlets.
If sound is coming through an adjoining wall, Keller suggests looking at outlets and other spots where sound might have a path to get in. An electrician can remove outlets and switches and put fire-stopping putty inside your electrical box, which should lessen the sound, but Ray Muratore of Staten Island’s Handyman Connection cautions that could get expensive (upwards of $1,000 for the length of a wall) considering the price of materials and hourly labor for an electrician. “You’d really have to decide if the cost is worth the additional quiet,” he says.
Windows are often the weak link.
Heavy curtains won’t do much to reduce noise beyond that of birds’ chirping, says Keller. Searching for a solution to the ambulances and noise from the hospital down the block from his Manhattan rental, Boris Vorobev found Indow Windows, which makes custom plexiglass window inserts to dampen sound. The ones for just the bedroom windows cost $1,700, but Vorobev says the push-in inserts were easy to install and worked well. He figures spending “half a month’s rent was better than 12 months of no sleep.” If you want to be able to actually open your window and have a little more to invest, Cityproof, based in Long Island City, makes operable windows that are installed inside your exterior window. “It’s relatively expensive,” Keller says, “but it does a great job” (from $1,400 for a single window, including installation).
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