Soundproof Your Rental Bedroom in Under 10 Minutes for $40
If you’re in a rental apartment, the last thing you want to do is pay a lot of money to make it livable. Perhaps the only thing worse is pissing off your roommate(s) while you’re having loud — ahem — relations, or blasting Gregorian chants from your bedroom on Sunday mornings. Which means you need to find an easy, reversible and affordable solution for privacy, while respecting thy neighbors.
Charlie of Working Girl Press did a little sleuthing and researched sound proofing methods before coming up with a quick, easy, and temporary solution that suited her situation and her wallet. She’s careful to say she has a solid core door, so for those of you with cheaper, hollow core versions, the result might not be the same.
All you need is:
Here’s how she describes the process:
You can order the threshold to within 1/4″ sizes from your local hardware store. When you get it, it should be able to just wedge it between your door jamb – no need to screw it down.
The adhesive weather strip is very discrete if you have a white door frame, like I do. You peel the back off and stick it down around the door frame. When you close the door it should seal up the gap between your door and the frame. Piece of cake.
Charlie tested the results, using a decibel meter (can we call that a decibel-o-meter? a decilblometer?) that she used to measure the sound after her project. According to Charlie, with music playing in the living room and the bedroom door open, the decibels measured 50-60, which is normal speaking volume. With the door closed it decreased by 10-20 decibels, to what her decibel app calls a “normal quiet household.”
Thanks Charlie!
Re-edited from a post originally published 10.29.2014 – NT
