We live in a great house which is mostly an open plan space comprising kitchen, loungue and dining area with full height double pitched roof with mezzanine and connecting passarele. Two bedrooms and bathroom are in an offshot corridor without separating door and upstairs is my home office, guest room and another bathroom.

However with a 5 year old and a nearly 3 year old the echoey noise drives us mad. The floor is tiled with a large rug in loungue area and the pitched ceiling is pine. Underneath the mezzanine is concrete ceiling or wood. There are two patio doors. Curtains on all window.

The mezzanine and passerelle is guarded by glass sheets and a railing.

Any tips and ideas how to make sound softer and ideas to soak up the sound welcome. Can post photos if the font of all knowledge thinks this will help.

Many thanks in advance.

smaller house – filled with clutter
cats instead of kids

Cover the walls in These

lots of curtains, rugs and tapestries.

sorbothane flooring? – i doubt it exists, it would be massively expensive but it would probably work 🙂

Fill it with feathers, right to the top.

Curtains, soft furnishings, draped tapestries / throws over balconies, false ‘ceiling’ of a hung sheet etc etc – basically anything soft you can.
Short of that,

Suck it up princess, your house sounds awesome, the kind of place I dream of! Sounds to me like an echo comes with the territory, so to speak.

Try experimenting with doing something on each of the surfaces. You might get a really good result from just one or two of them, but it needs some trial and error. A couple of old duvets can be used to hang on / over / cover different parts, because you have a lot of different surfaces combining there. A cheap noise meter could give you measurements to compare.

I say this as I’ve seen it done as part of an experiment in an acoustically terrible space. The results were pretty quick to deduct after they had moved a few duvets around a few times.

lots of curtains, rugs and tapestries.

All of those work really well. If it’s really bad you can space wall hangings slightly off the wall to help. Bean bags in corners as well. I had to sort a horriby resonant space out once and it didn’t take too much of this stuff to sort it but rugs and soft furnishings made the biggest difference

As Tootall says as well. You can drag stuff like duvets around to give you an idea on where to concentrate. If you want to measure then a laptop mic, audacity software and a clap of the hands will give you a ballpark idea of how much difference you are making

Trialling with some duvets sounds like a great idea.

Projects in mind that might or might not help are:

Creating a metre ish high stud wall to semi box in a section of the mezzanine, at present it is steel railing and mesh. Will insulate the stud wall internally.

Building a 2.5m high ish 0.7m wide internal feature type log pile.

Fitting a heavy door to the offshoot coridor to isolate bedrooms and quieten them for when someone listening to music or watching a film.

And maybe building some sort of shelving screen to block loungue area off slightly from front door which is not often used but opens directly into the large space direct from outside.

We build open plan schools these days.

Try something here:

http://www.ecophon.com/uk/

Ear plugs FTFY

I wouldn’t have thought insulating a metre high stud wall internally would help at all, you need to stop sound bouncing off hard surfaces rather than stop it going through.

Tenting the ceiling in thin material may give the best results for your cash, even something thin and see through may be enough to stop the echo.

Some of those 6 foot high bookcase/cubbyhole room dividers that Ikea do would probably be effective at dividing up the space without completely blocking the view to the other side, you probably wouldn’t need to stuff them full of clutter, just your usual selection of books/toys/ornaments would be enough to create a bumpy ‘unflat’ surface that will reflect sound in all directions and reduce echo.

* I am no expert, just speaking my mind 🙂

Have a big garden. With a nice Wendy house in it.

Then you can chuck the kids out when you want some peace 😀

Ecophon is amazing stuff. Aim for about 30-40% of the floor area (equiv) on the underside of the ceiling and you will have a lovely dead space

What flooring have you got? If hard flooring then carpet has to be the first place to start in my opinion.

connecting passarele.

wtf is that? I’m guessing its a secret passage for smuggling your mistress to and fro.

Work away from home 🙂

it’s like a walkway. The stairs are at one end of the house where the open space is full house height and the upstairs rooms are at the other end of this open space..

wwaswas – Member
lots of curtains, rugs and tapestries.

+1!

I know Bunnyhop off here may be able to help – I’ve seen here work! Beautiful curtains….

Good luck, hope you get something sorted!

You need to do this in two stages- First reduce noise produced- e.g. no shoes on hard flooring. This might not always be manageable.
second, absorb what noise is produced, using soft furnishings etc. Smaller spaces will assist too, by decreasing distances and thus echoes.

Solid floors are notoriously loud- consider quality carpets and good underlay. Curtains (full length) not blinds, or perhaps both- vertical blinds behind the curtains. Hang things on the wall, but not in glass frames.

Break up the height of the space- big (soft) pendant lampshades?

Carpets are not an option. We have hard tiles as do most french houses. A few more rugs might be. Rerally thanks everyone some funny ideas (have already considered the gaffa tape option) and some good ‘oh yes’ ideas.

Large reverberant rooms hard surfaces do you may need to add soundproof panels, carpets partition walls.