Sound insulation

The insulators came and did the inner stud wall on the main floor. What a mess! Noisy, dusty. During the installation I escaped to the garage. After they finished, our general contractor checked for missing insulation, cleaned up extensively, and cleaned extraneous foam insulation plugs from walls and around windows.

Sound insulation, on the other hand, is much easier and cleaner. Tom and I have been working on installing it ourselves. We started with the powder room, master bedroom/bath walls, north and the east wall rim joist addition of foil-faced polyiso blocks. Then came Tom’s office and the downstairs bath. Early on, we used mostly 24” kraft paper-faced fiberglass batts. It’s the right width, and we can get it easily. Tim got some denim batts, but they are for walls on 16” centers, and at first we had a lot of trouble keeping them in place. Also, fiberglass is much cheaper.

With Tom unavailable during the week, I carried on insulating most of the downstairs bath. At this point, I realized that the denim 15” batts that we had to get (because the 23” width was not readily available when we needed the insulation) actually turn out to be easier to install than I thought. They come in packs of 8. Three of them have 2 lines of perforations, dividing the batts length-wise into three sections, two of them have a single line of perforations, and 3 of them have no perforations. The batts are really easy to pull apart along the perforations—a beastly job if you have to cut them. You can combine various widths to fit together in different widths between studs and they stay in place pretty well once they are anchored at the top. To be safe, I use staples all the way down, especially in areas where I need to cut the batts to fit around pipes and ductwork.

I finished the sound insulation on the downstairs bath and the caretaker’s bedroom and decided to extend it into the part of the closet that is adjacent to the family room. I’m using the denim batts, as they are purported to have better sound insulating qualities than fiberglass, which is easier to work with. I insulated the wall between the bedroom and seasonal storage with fiberglass batts. It goes in quickly and easily with the paper backing, especially since it is the right size for the stud space. I finished that on Saturday and then began work on the garage. Phew!

I really know my way around inside a wall, folks!