I live in a condo where sounds, at least some sounds, pass way too easy between us and some of our neighbors. It seems to me that the sound mainly emanates from a corner in the living room and a corner of the bathroom where a brick wall meets a drywall wall and where there’s a very narrow gap that presumably goes all the way through.
The living room has a 14 foot ceiling, so I want to get this right the first time and I’m hoping the teeming millions have some suggestions for how to best close this gap in an efficient and esthetic manner.
And if someone knows how much it would matter to plug the gap on the other side as well, that would be good, but as that is a rental I’m not hopeful that will happen any time soon.
You can drill holes in the wall, insert acoustic foam available in cans which will self expand inside. Search YouTube and there are many videos of how to do it.
Not sure if it complies with housing codes and regulations where you live.
I’m not talking about insulating the wall, although that would probably be necessary to get things all the way sound insulated.
The outer walls of the building and interior load bearing walls are brick and mortar inside and out. The wall between my living room and the living room of my neighbor is drywall and I suppose something to keep the drywall up.
Where the exterior wall and the interior meet at a 90 degree angle, there is a tiny gap, which appears to be the source of the sound leaking in from the neighbor.
Now injecting foam right at the end of the wall might work, but would require negotiating with the owner of next door as they’d have to have someone come in and trim excess foam coming out of the gap on their side. And of course it would require a lot of foam and caulking and painting the holes on this side.
I’d much rather find a solution just to caulk the corner on my side if that is viable.
Caulk may be enough, preferably on both your side and the neighbor’s side. I don’t think foam adds much benefit, and it’s hard to clean off brick. Even if you did use foam, you’d probably end up caulking over it anyway to try to get a cleaner edge, since if there’s a big enough gap to put foam in (those nozzles are pretty large, like 1/8" at least, it’ll be big enough to see the foam, and you won’t want that. I can’t say what the right caulk would be though, but it’ll want to be strong and flexible since the walls will move differently relative to each other. Light switches and electric outlets can also be a path for sound, but those are harder to properly isolate after construction is finished.