My son has been drumming for about 8 years, and I love it. I’ve always been a fan of music and encouraged all of my kids to pick up any musical instruments they wanted. He’s taken to music the most, playing saxaphone, bass guitar, but has dedicated most of his efforts to the drums. And he’s really good. With the pandemic of 2020, the rest of the family got to hear a lot of drums. He practiced up to 3 hours a day, and I quickly realized the house is not ideal for a situation of loud music in the basement while the rest of us try to be productive and work.
The current music room is the playroom I built for the kids many years ago. It is open to the basement stairs, carpeted, and drywalled walls and ceiling. There is limited height in our basement, so the floor and ceiling don’t have a lot of room. The top of the basement stairs has a hollow door, which also has a cat door in it (which our current cat doesn’t use).
I think there’s several phases of soundproofing that I can tackle with our current situation, in order of cost and difficulty:
- Replace the hollow door with a solid pine door. That’s the project I’m tackling this week.
- Add a wall alongside the stairs, with a second door at the bottom, to contain the sound a little more and provide access for pets to the rest of the basement.
- Replace the room with a better soundproofed room.
I considered getting a pre-hung solid door or a slab – I’ve replaced many flat, hollow interior doors in the house with 6-panel doors, and I’ve always used the slabs so I’m pretty used to them, but lining up the hinges and latches can be difficult. Watching videos on installing the pre-hung door didn’t look much easier, as you need to make sure all the walls are plumb, and then you have even more trim to install and paint. I decided to go with the slab as the enemy I know.
I bought the door earlier this week, a solid pine door, and yesterday I trimmed it to height. We have 30×78 openings, but really it’s about 77 1/4. I took off the old door for a template, and while it was down I marked the hinges and door knob openings. We had a storm blow through so that was all I tackled on day one, but at least now I can slide the slab in place and compare the noise before and after.
Day 1 pictures: Noise levels while Clark was doing some rudiments – not at full volume so I’m hoping to get another reading today. Also old and new door pictures. Today I tackle a mini-project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uxdbk5XJQ4&feature=emb_logo which will make routing out the hinges much easier than my previous attempts.
