Say Goodbye to Outside Noises

If home is a little slice of heaven, then it shouldn't be too unreasonable to demand a little peace and quiet. Unfortunately it isn't always easy to obtain - especially if there are rock music loving teenagers in the home. At certain times, these sounds can be inviting - for they serve as the ambience of a home bustling with life. At other times these sounds are nothing more than disturbing and it seems as though we can't even hear our own thoughts. What can we do short of packing up and moving to the moon (or declaring a new 'no music' rule in our homes)?

One of the things you can do is install an acoustical ceiling. Acoustical ceilings are designed to absorb sound. Let's learn a little bit about how sound travels in the home before we investigate how a contractor can minimize it and create that little slice of heaven.

How Sounds Travel Throughout the House

Sounds inside the home travel through the air and when their waves hit a surface, like a wall or a ceiling, they not only echo, they vibrate that wall or ceiling. That's why when your teenager pumps up the volume of his stereo, it feels as though the entire house is about to shake apart. If the volume is loud enough, these sound waves will penetrate your walls and that includes your ceilings too.

Although your music-thumping teenager may enjoy it, the reverberation going on in his room is unbelievable. The objects in his room (such as his bed, desk, carpeting, or rugs) will absorb as much of these sound waves as they can, but unless you have acoustical ceilings in your home, you're going to be assaulted by these sound waves every time he cranks up the radio.

How Acoustical Ceilings Deal With Sound Waves

Acoustical ceilings employ the use of perforated ceiling tile and you've probably seen this kind of tile in large buildings. The holes in this tile trap a lot of the sound waves in the air and they prevent them from reverberating (bouncing onto other surfaces and creating an echo).

In the past, we believed that perforated ceiling tile was all that we needed, but now contractors know that acoustical ceilings work much better when they're made permeable.

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Your contractor can minimize your exposure to those pesky sound waves in one of two ways:

(1) By installing sound-deadening insulation (like gypsum for example) behind your ceiling's tile, or

(2) By reducing the mount of air between the ceiling and the floor that it's under with insulation like building felt.

Insulating a ceiling with building felt (and lots of it) not only helps to reduce sound waves from entering a room; it also helps to prevent them from leaving a room. Preventing sound waves from leaving a room sounds like a perfect home improvement treatment for the teenage section of the house alone!

Author Paul White represents FloridaHomeBuild.com. A site designed to help home owners from Florida locate local home contractors with their home improvement projects.
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