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 Is Your Home Too Noisy? Consider SoundproofingOn the first Thursday of each month, art galleries in John Goodwin's Portland, Ore., neighborhood host evening receptions, filling the streets with tourists and musicians. On his balcony, "the noise is crazy," says Mr. Goodwin, who lives on the seventh floor. "But when I close my balcony door, the noise is gone. I can still see the people...but I can't hear a thing. It's eerie." Mr. Goodwin's condo is one of 164 virtually soundproof apartments developers recently converted from an old warehouse building. Noise is suppressed by pockets of air, says Greg Vickers, the project construction manager. Sound battens are in between four layers of wallboard, and there's a 10-inch-thick structure between floors. Such steps are too involved to add to an existing home, but you could adopt another suggestion of Mr. Vickers and hang a third pane of glass in all your windows that face an obnoxious sound source, like a freeway. Homeowners all over the country would like quiet surroundings and relief from noise, whether from highways or the neighbor's air conditioner. Noise, measured in decibels, is all around us, from a quiet office or residential street (40 decibels) to highways (70 decibels) or leaf blowers (110 decibels). Prolonged exposure to sound over 85 decibels can cause deafness, says the League for the Hard of Hearing in New York and Oakland Park, Fla. Then there's the annoyance factor. Greg Oltman, president of the Illinois Landscape Contractors Association, and his wife had enjoyed bucolic evenings in Union, Ill., until the mid-1980s when a new house was built in an adjoining lot. "First, it was the construction noise," Mr. Oltman says. "But we preferred that to the loud music and raised voices coming from our new neighbors' patio until late each night." Mr. Oltman couldn't close a door on the cacophony, but he did find a way to cut down much of that noise. He planted 21 arborvitae evergreen shrubs at five-foot intervals along the edge of his property. Arborvitae and junipers are favorites for providing noise and visual screening because they grow quickly and eventually form a wall of solid green. To muffle the noise while his were growing, Mr. Oltman also planted lilac bushes in between each shrub, reducing the noise level by at least a third. A similar row of arborvitae might cost about $4,500 installed. Berm Me Up, Please Steve Kooyenga, a landscape architect with Chalet Nursery and Landscape in Wilmette, Ill., says the best protection against unwanted outdoor sound is a six-foot-high earthen berm, at a cost of about $60 a foot. You can get some benefit from a deciduous privet hedge ($15 a foot), at least in the summer while the bushes have leaves. Any type of solid board fence ($20 to $30 a foot) also will help, but local zoning laws often limit the height and location of fences. For immediate effect, Mr. Kooyenga suggests combining a fence with a row of six-foot-high spruce trees ($75 a foot). Or install a quality outdoor fountain for about $1,000. Waterfalls that crash into little ponds start at $5,000. "People in urban areas are adding sound systems to their patios," Mr. Kooyenga says, "and playing CDs of soothing sounds, like ocean waves or forest birds." There are even speakers that blend into the landscape because they look like rocks or boulders. Flight 678 Is on Time Karen and Scott Brady of Palatine, Ill., lived under a flight path to O'Hare Field, Chicago, for 15 years, with jets grinding overhead as often as every two minutes. "The noise went on all night," says Mrs. Brady. "And it was worse when the weather was clear. After a while we kind of tuned it out. But after September 11, when all airport traffic ceased, we were shocked at how incredibly quiet it was." To restore some of that silence, the Bradys recently spent $22,000 to replace the windows in their house with "the highest quality Pella I could get," Mrs. Brady says. "Now there's a definite reduction to the daily assault." The best window for damping sound, says Joe Hayden, certification engineer for the Pella Corp. in Pella, Iowa, is a double pane with a sheet of plastic laminated to one of the inside panes. Such windows, he says, can reduce outdoor sounds by up to 80%, making the chainsaw (120 decibels) in your neighbor's yard less noisy than your own refrigerator (50 decibels). Each new standard-size double-pane casement window will cost about $300 uninstalled. The price doubles, Mr. Hayden says, for insulated windows with plastic laminates. In addition to double-pane windows, Cliff Borowitz, president of CB Developments Inc. in Bartlett, Ill., added special insulation and shingles to the $1.6 million Prairie Style house he just finished in Park Ridge, right under one of O'Hare's busiest approaches. You might replace your roof with the thick architectural grade shingles Mr. Borowitz and other O'Hare-area builders use. Cole Newland, president of the Associated Roofing Contractors of Northern California in Sacramento, says cedar-shake shingles are better than asbestos, tile or slate roofing in keeping out noise. However, he discovered the quietest roofs by accident, when he was helping homeowners lower their heating and air conditioning bills. "We tore the old roof off down to the plywood, then used one-by-four inch strips of wood to create an airspace, added a layer of AstroFoil reflective insulation, then another layer of one-by-fours, a second layer of plywood and finally, the shingles. The house is energy efficient, but it's also so quiet that we're doing the same roof for people in noisy areas." The Patter of Big Feet If you're being driven crazy by footsteps overhead, Maxxon Corporation, Hamel, Minn., makes a product called the Acoustimat that can eliminate up to 90% of the sounds that travel between floors, Mr. Vickers says. Find descriptions of this and other sound-reducing products at www.quietsolution.com. If all else fails, you can tear down your existing home and replace it -- with concrete. According to the Concrete Homes Council in Atlanta, houses made with cement walls and floors are 80% quieter than wood construction. Concrete houses are also more expensive -- by 3% to 9%. Nevertheless, by 2006, the trade group says, 18% of all new houses will be made of concrete. Like Mr. Newland's noise-reducing roof, concrete homes were first built for another purpose -- to withstand high winds from hurricanes and tornadoes. Most of them, says Dave Pfanmiller, chairman of the Concrete Homes Council, were built along the coastline, like the 12 he put up in Topsail Island and Raleigh, N.C. "We didn't think about putting them in noisy areas," he says, "until homeowners complained that they couldn't hear the ocean." 
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