When you can’t handle your thin walls anymore
Semi-detached house gets soundproofed after hearing the neighbours fight and yell
Sometimes I get preoccupied with the modest size of my detached home. It’s a 1,500-square-foot, 2- 1⁄
2 bedroom (and 1- 1⁄ storey) that’s
2 dwarfed by the detached home it shares a driveway with.
But after listening to the hardships my friend Karl has endured recently, the word “detached” has been top of mind.
Karl’s house, a semi-detached just down the street from my home, is a spacious and homey open-concept semi I’d be proud to call my own (and Karl might say that sometimes I treat it like it is). However, Karl has found out sharing a wall with your neighbours can be challenging, as a rotating cast of renters has taken up residence next door.
Incredibly, he and his wife would learn, all that separated their master bedroom from their neighbours’ was some plaster and lath and the studs behind it.
About a year ago, Karl was privy to every grievance and dispute between partners who liked to converse by yelling at full volume. Then there was the couple that blasted loud music through the night and smoked cigarettes indoors, their secondhand smoke wafting into Karl’s home through the vents. Karl and his wife toughed both of those out and ironically, it was a quieter neighbour that prompted them to soundproof the wall behind their bed in their master bedroom, after her loud phone conversation on New Year’s morning ensured they started 2017 feeling groggy.
Karl was ready to start tearing apart the existing plaster when I arrived with my tool bag on a recent Saturday morning. He’d purchased Safe ’n’ Sound insulation — intended to both reduce noise between rooms and, in the event of a fire, delay its spread — as well as four slabs of ultra-thick, 5/8-inch gypsum panels by QuietRock, a company whose calling card is soundproof products.
The night before, another friend had helped Karl clear the workspace and rip off the decorative, textured pine board. Karl had also chatted with his neighbours to let them know we’d be the ones making a lot of noise that day.
We put down our coffee mugs, hung plastic sheets, closed the bedroom door and opened the windows. Then we donned respirators and goggles and started smashing and scraping away the plaster on the 14-by-ninefoot wall with a shovel and a chisel. As the dust settled on the floor and on our faces, we pried the wooden lath from the studs with hammers, being careful not to rap the neighbours’ wall. We were working quickly, I thought, and after loading the fragments into heavy-duty bags and hauling them down the steps and onto the porch, I slipped off my now moist respirator mask to get some fresh air. Somehow, nearly two hours had already passed.
I’m learning it’s the small things, such as applying putty around junction boxes and securing the electrical sockets to studs, that slow these projects down. But by lunchtime, the space was ready for drywall and I was demanding pizza. (I got the feeling Karl wanted to keep going.)
Four slices and some wings later, and we had the energy to lug the four, four-by-nine-foot drywall boards up the stairs.
We had to decide whether to cut the boards so that one ended and the other began at the stud or to just leave it and trust it wouldn’t sag in the middle. We compromised by attaching shims to the end of one board and anchoring it against the next one.
The irregular wall made things a bit tricky, but by measuring twice before cutting into the board with a precision knife, Karl was able to carve out pieces that aligned nearly perfectly. We did leave one fairly large gap between a couple of pieces of drywall, but I wasn’t too concerned at first, repeating a phrase I’d heard when I was getting help installing drywall on my ceiling — “the tapeand-mud guy will take care of that.”
Karl wasn’t too impressed. He’d planned to tape and mud himself. I wished him luck, but told him I didn’t feel comfortable tackling that project yet, even in someone else’s house (he’d eventually decided to pay someone to do it).
Returning home, I resisted the urge to blast my Spotify playlist through my laptop speakers. But I did give our bedroom wall an affectionate tap before turning in for the night.
As for Karl, he’s still thinking about how he’d like to finish the wall but says, so far, he’s been able to contemplate it in a quiet room. Matthew Chung, 34, is a communications manager living in and attempting to renovate his first house in Toronto’s east end. You can follow his progress on Instagram @mjechung.