Our Vaughan home has the primary bedroom directly above the attached garage. Every time someone parked, the garage door noise and the car engine reverberated through the bedroom floor. We soundproofed it.
The problem:
Two types of noise:
- Impact (footsteps on the garage floor, car door closing): structure-borne
- Airborne (garage door motor, voices): transmitted through the shared floor assembly
What we did:
Primary approach: address the ceiling of the garage (below the bedroom floor).
- Removed existing uninsulated drywall ceiling in garage
- Installed Rockwool Safe’n’Sound between joists (R-15 acoustic)
- Installed resilient hat channels (RC-1) across all joists, perpendicular
- Two layers of 5/8-inch type X drywall on the channels with Green Glue compound between layers
- Taped, mudded, painted
Cost:
- Rockwool Safe’n’Sound (garage ceiling, 240 sq ft): $640 supply
- Resilient channels: $280 supply
- Two layers 5/8-inch type X drywall: $840 supply
- Green Glue (24 tubes): $380 supply
- Drywaller labour (tear-out, framing, install, tape, mud, paint): $3,200
- Total: $5,340
Result:
The garage door motor no longer wakes us up. Footsteps in the garage are barely audible. The improvement is dramatic — from “clearly audible and disruptive” to “background noise at most.”
What didn’t help as much:
Adding Rockwool to the bedroom floor (we laid acoustic underlay under the existing engineered hardwood during a separate refinishing project). The ceiling treatment was the high-leverage move.