Neighbour Noise Problems or Noisy Neighbours?

Neighbour noise is not the same as noisy neighbours.  Poor insulation will render someone's perfectly normal behaviour a noise nuisance to you and you will have to look at your options.

For example, hard surfaces aggravate sound transmission through floors.  Carpeting, preferably with a resilient underlay will help, but don’t expect too much – depending on the floor construction this may simply change a high frequency click-click into a low frequency thump-thump.  Again your neighbours probably have hard floors because they prefer them.

Where a carpeted floor is being replaced with a timber laminate, impact sound transmission can become a new problem -  typically a 20 decibel reduction in insulation performance. This shifts impact noise from an 'acceptable' level to what is often described as 'intolerable'.  This can be minimised, but only at the laying stage, by a suitable underlay – ideally a chipboard laminated to a resilient felt – but that of course raises the floor level by up to an inch or so.  That means doors have to be trimmed. 

There are so many different floor constructions and sound transmission types that it is not possible to offer any one single cure.  But it is perfectly practical for the layman to get a better understanding of how best to tackle the problem. Our online noise assessment form will help you to make the decisions you need to quieten things down.