Jas hired me for an interesting soundproofing project in his Mad River Valley cabin. Noise travels easily through the kitchen ceiling (which is also the second floor) and disturbs renters in the bedrooms upstairs. That is the problem we’re trying to fix.

Jas doesn’t want to hide his gorgeous exposed timber joists, so our acoustic solution consists of two extra layers of ceiling within each bay. The first layer, Advantech, ties adjacent floorboards together and stiffens the floor. The second layer, drywall, serves as a smooth paintable finish surface while providing additional thickness. Between the layers we sandwiched a healthy squeeze of acoustical glue for extra dampening.

First we measured and cut Advantech. In ideal circumstances, this task would be as simple as measuring the width and length of each bay… but built houses never present ideal circumstances. Our timber joists were slightly crooked, making each bay vary in width. Worse, there was a joint above the kitchen island where two joists butted end-to-end, and the two joists didn’t line up at all.

In many cases we settled for cutting the Advantech pieces narrower than the bays so they’d fit easily between the unruly timber joists. We did the same with the drywall later, varying the seam locations. The downside of this approach was leaving unsightly gaps alongside the timer joists, which we’ll have to hide later. “A little bit of spackle and paint/Make a carpenter what he ain’t.”

We had to balance each piece in place over our heads while one person drilled in the first few screws to hold it permanently. That was a challenge, especially for the densely-packed Advantech… we took to drilling pilot holes so the wood would accept screws more easily. Jas dreamed up a T-stick to prop up each piece from the floor, giving us a crucial extra hand on the largest pieces.

With only about one bay complete, we can’t yet gauge how effectively the system absorbs noise. Stay tuned to hear the final report.