About 2 years after my wife and I purchased this absolutely lovely and normally quiet townhome in Bonita, our neighbors (on both sides) moved out, and when the new tenants moved in, we quickly discovered this scary little thing called “The connecting walls”. Between the clomping, TV’s, loud voices, and blasting stereo sounds, we felt like our wonderful quality of life had essentially been vaporized. It was bad. Being a realist, and knowing that people are always going to be people, and claim their portion of their right to live their life too, constantly knocking on doors, complaining to the HOA, and other such solutions which just tend to create a hostile, and even lower quality of life environment to live in, we thought we had only 2 solutions: Move or live with it.
On a whim, and as a kind of last chance café ditch effort, we researched and then finally agreed to have Soundproof San Diego come out to our house for a looksee and analysis to see if anything could actually be done to remedy the situation. The actual owner of the company (Neil), who is both an engineer and a contractor did exactly that. After his assessment of the property was finished, he gave us this very detailed explanation/ demo, using the actual construction materials that he would recommend using in order for us to achieve the highest possible level of noise reduction. That demo was enormously helpful in providing us with not only a sense of clarity about the whole process, but also in getting our confidence levels up to a point where we felt safe enough to commit.
Although we admittedly suffered some initial sticker shock from the cost estimate, in terms of both $$ and the time required to complete it, we did in fact take that leap of faith and contracted to have all 4 connecting walls to the adjacent properties (upstairs/downstairs), the living room ceiling and the bathroom connecting wall all soundproofed using their methodology.
After the project was fully completed, my wife and I were sitting on the couch that first night and she just nodded in total agreement when I looked at her and said this place is just “scary” quiet. The reduction in noise wasn’t just very impressive, it was enormously different. Admittedly, we were just overjoyed about not having to move out of our dream home, but even more pronounced was that sense of freedom we felt in knowing that we were no longer being held captive by someone else’s noise pollution. Would I do this again? In a heartbeat!
