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If you change the use of your rooms don’t have noisier spaces such as the living room over their bedrooms.
Take care not to reduce the sound insulation of the floor or help sound to travel by way of the walls to downstairs.
- If you lift floorboards to fit pipes or wiring, always replace or top up the deafening ash or mineral fibre between floor joists.
- Fit carpet or compressible linoleum or vinyls in preference to laminates, tiles, or solid wood to avoid the noise of footsteps on hard floors.
- Reduce noise with compressible underlays (for example, underlay made of recycled tyres.
If you must fit laminate, solid wood, or ceramic tiles because someone in the family is allergic to dust mites, you should take care not to create noise nuisance. There needs to be a separation between the hard floor covering from the floor, walls, kitchen units, and skirting boards:
- Have the floor covered with a compressible or resilient underlay to separate the flooring from the floor boards and joists.
- The resilient layer is lapped up the walls so that it can be wrapped around the edge of the floor covering to keep the flooring separate from the wall.
- If you want cover strips or mouldings to tidy up the edges of the flooring, make sure they’re fixed to the skirting board above the resilient layer — don’t let them touch the flooring!
Loosely fixed floor boards create their own noise problems — re-fix the floorboards so they don’t move when you walk on them.
Don’t sand upper storey floors for a decorative finish — they can be just as noisy as laminate floors! If a floor is already sanded, seal the gaps between the boards with sealant and cover it with rugs, held in place with non-slip strips. Better still to cover the sanded floor with underlay and carpet!
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