Home Improvement Tips From Edgar Allan Poe Characters
Today’s Topic: Noise From Under the Floorboards.
Your Host: The Unnamed Narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart
It can drive you around the bend, can’t it? Unusual or unpleasant noises from the walls, ceilings, or in this case, from under the floorboards, can keep you and your family awake at night and provide constant distraction.
Let’s face it though: such unwanted ‘noise pollution’ is a constant in today’s homes due to open floor plans, hasty construction, and a multitude of appliances and entertainment gear.
You can also easily find yourself in a position, as I once did, where you have stowed the body of this older fellow across the hall under the floorboards after you killed him and in follow-on interviews with the police find yourself distracted by the ever-louder pounding of this guy’s heart.
Even professional home remodelers can ‘foul up’ a situation and make it worse, and in this case, boy, did I ever.
Good guy! I really had nothing against him personally, I didn’t want his gold, he hadn’t insulted me, nothing like that. There was just something about his eye that got to me, so, you know, I killed him, and buried him in the floorboards of the house.
If you’re ever in this position as a homeowner and need a ‘quick fix’ repair strategy to get you by until you can get a professional out, simply measure the guy to determine the space you’ll need to hide him – let me mention again, good guy! I won’t say a thing against him! He just had this evil eye thing going on and it finally got to me – and pry up the correct number of floorboards you’ll need for the best fit.
Use a measuring tape, the kind you can get at your local hardware store that spools back into place. It’s always best to measure first rather than rely on your judgment and regret it later. You don’t want to pry up too many floorboards — you never want to do more work than you have to — but you don’t want to pry up too few either.
What’s unusual about this situation I found myself in, or at least I found it to be, is that in conversation with these really quite pleasant guys from the police, I kept getting distracted by what turned out to be the pounding of this guy’s heart from under the floorboard! If you can believe such a thing. I mean he’s dead and all.
Nonetheless it ended up distracting me from this really quite nice conversation I was having with them, and caused me to grow very pale, and speak over-rapidly and in a heightened voice. I’ve listened to the tapes since, I sound so different on tape than I thought I did! That ever happen think to you?
Anyway.
All of this could have been avoided if I had only implemented some simple sound baffling techniques from the get-go and gone on with my exceedingly high-strung life. This is your chance to learn from my mistakes.
A lot of these sound problems could have been avoided at the construction stage by the way, rather than requiring you to retrofit your house after the fact.
Admittedly, this takes a lot of foresight, but it should be a simple matter for any prospective homeowner to ask themselves:
Do I at some point anticipate developing an intense antagonism towards the perfectly nice fellow on the other side of the hallway? Even just a smidge of a thought? Think, think, think about this, I say, or at least this is what works for me. Think, think, think, think, think.
If I do knock the old guy off, will I be hiding him beneath the floorboards of the study?
If so, is there a possibility that his heartbeat – again, this fine person is dead, so I can’t tell you where the heartbeat is coming from, just that it might – is there a possibility that his heartbeat will resound from the floor right underneath where you’re sitting?
If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then the time to fix the problem is before it happens, at the construction stage.
The quandary is that when you go to your big box hardware store, the choices can be overwhelming.
Your first decision is whether to go with sound blocker or sound absorbing solutions.
Sound blockers keep noise from traveling through walls and floors from one space to another.
They are typically hard, heavy, thick, or—in some cases—flexible materials that reflect noise. To keep noise from entering a room, they are typically installed in walls, ceilings, floors, and doors.
Sound absorbing materials by contrast keep noise from bouncing around inside a room, improving sound quality in a room.
Sound absorbing materials are typically porous, lightweight, and soft to the touch—foam panels are a familiar form. Because they are often applied to surfaces as a finish material, they come in a variety of colors and styles.
In this case your clear choice is the sound blocker solution; properly executed you can achieve a Sound Transmission Class (STC) rating from 40 to the high 60’s, about what get in apartment building where sound dampening is quite important to the residential experience.
An effective and affordable way to improve the soundproofing performance of floors is to put batt or blanket insulation between studs or joists. This absorbs the sound that would otherwise easily travel through the air pockets between wall framing.
Major insulation manufacturers, including CertainTeed, Johns Manville, Knauf Fiber Glass, and Owens-Corning, market 3 1/2-inch-thick fiberglass or rock wool batts specifically for this purpose. They are both excellent at absorbing the sound that would otherwise travel through the air.
With these simple steps you can dramatically reduce the sound amplifying effects of resounding (or I suppose imagined, I get that) heartbeats coming from below the flooring. From a dead guy.
But what if you hadn’t the foresight to manage the sound issue in the construction process?
For the answer to that I have one word: carpeting.
This is an overlooked solution for the heartbeat-from-a-dead-guy suffering individual, and so easy to pull off.
There are many styles, thickness, and colors of throw rugs now available from retailers, including online retailers like Amazon. Further, if you have Amazon Prime, you can likely get these somewhat bulky products delivered to your doorstep…for free, often with next day delivery.
Buy an assortment of these throw rugs in every shape and color. Let yourself go and express yourself through these delightful interior decorating accents. While some say it is best to have a theme or pattern in mind when you are at the purchasing stage, a case can be made for completely random selection.
Your next steps depend on whether you are at the pre-dead-guy stage or the post-dead-guy stage.
If you pile the rugs high in the pre-dead-guy stage you’re just going to have to pull them up and put them off to one side while you do the floorboards thing and all that.
Conversely, if you are in the post-dead-guy stage, there is going to be certain amount of work involved in unrolling and laying out the rugs after the fact.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Given the chance to re-do this whole series of events I’ve been going on about, I think I would opt for laying down the rugs after I had put this fellow down in the floor.
I could have experimented and if I had found the heartbeat sound distracting, I could have piled up the rugs just as high as I needed to in order to muffle the sound. You don’t want your head scraping the ceiling! I don’t mean that! But simply layering the floor with several applications of carpeting would no doubt have done the trick.
We hope this helps, even if you’re not a homicidal maniac with impulse control issues.
Tune in for the next episode in our home improvement series covering Proper Brick-Laying and Mortar Preparation if You Are Ever Walling Up an Ancient Enemy Into a Very Space-Constrained Vertical Crypt-Like Space.
A word to the wise: don’t think you’re going to mix and lay mortar like a pro first time out…you’ll need some practice.
Until next time, this is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s characters signing off.
