Apartment soundproofing in Batumi: walls, ceiling, floor and risers

What exactly you hear, and which way it gets in

Apartment soundproofing in Batumi starts with the question of what is bothering you. Voices, the TV and music travel through the air, and lining with wool deals with them. Footsteps and suitcase wheels strike the slab directly and spread through the concrete of the whole building, while drains in the riser are heard through the pipes and the boxing.

Sound looks for a way round. Sockets on a shared wall sit back to back with the neighbours', a gap is left under the ceiling slab, the riser boxing was built without wool. So the foreman listens to the wall in the evening, when the neighbours are home, takes the socket covers off and taps along the junctions. Sometimes sealing one gap removes half the problem.

Walls: lining that doesn't touch the wall

We set the frame with a gap from the shared wall. The tracks are fixed to the floor and ceiling slabs over anti-vibration tape, and to the wall itself, where stiffness is needed, only through acoustic hangers. We fill the frame tightly, with no gaps, with mineral wool slabs and board it with two layers of plasterboard with staggered joints. The wool absorbs sound in the cavity, and the double board adds mass that sound finds hard to set vibrating.

We move the sockets off the shared wall into the lining and fill the old holes with mortar. The perimeter of the lining is sealed with elastic sealant: rigid filler in this joint cracks, and sound gets through the crack. Otherwise this is a standard installation of plasterboard frames and linings.

On a 50 mm profile, with a gap from the wall and two layers of board, our lining takes 8–10 cm off the room. If you can't spare the space, we fit frameless sound insulation panels: they are thinner, but they cost more and need a level wall.

The ceiling and footsteps from above

A suspended ceiling with wool on acoustic hangers deals well with voices and music from upstairs. Footsteps are harder. The impact goes into the slab and from there into the walls, and some of the sound gets round any ceiling. After the work the thumping is more muffled, but it doesn't go away.

Impact noise is only really removed where it starts: with a floating floor in the apartment above, a rug, soft pads under the furniture legs. If your upstairs neighbour is starting a renovation, we can price a floor like that for them too.

We keep downlights in such a ceiling to a minimum, because every hole weakens the lining. A stretch ceiling underneath is fine as a finish, but it does almost nothing for sound.

The floor: so that you aren't heard downstairs

We lay a soundproofing mat on the slab, stick a perimeter strip along the walls, the lining and around the pipes, and pour a reinforced screed that touches the building's concrete nowhere. The screed over the mat is at least 5 cm thick, and together with the mat the floor rises by 6–8 cm, so we work out the threshold and front door levels in advance. If the walls are being lined too, the frame goes up before the floor, directly on the slab. Drying and sign-off of the screed are covered on the page about floor screed.

One rigid bridge undoes the whole job. Mortar that has run in under the strip, wall tiles pressing against the floor tiles, a skirting screwed to both the wall and the floor, and the footsteps go back into the slab. We trim the strip only after the floor covering is down, and seal the joint between floor and wall with elastic sealant.

Risers, the ventilation shaft and the door

Plastic drain pipes are louder than old cast iron, and at night a drain from upstairs can be heard in the bedroom through the boxing. We wrap the riser inside the boxing in sound-insulating material, fill the boxing with wool and fit the pipe clamps with rubber inserts. If the riser is being replaced anyway, we use low-noise pipes; more on this on the page about replacing drain pipes.

We line the thin walls of the ventilation shaft the same way as a riser, but we don't narrow the duct itself: it serves the whole building, and the draught matters more than quiet. Noise from the common corridor comes in through the front door, and what helps there is a seal around the frame and a threshold that closes the gap above the floor.

Street noise

Street noise comes in through the windows, not the outside wall, and lining that wall changes almost nothing. What helps is double glazing chosen for street noise and an installation joint with no voids around the frame. The glass and profiles are compared on the page about aluminium versus uPVC windows. If the window is shut and you can still hear the street, we first look for a gap in the joint at the frame and the sill.

What we promise and how we sign off the layers

We don't promise silence in decibels: some sound travels through the building's structure, and how much of it remains doesn't depend on our wall alone. What we do tell you before the work is which noise will go almost completely and which will only get quieter.

Before boarding, we photograph the tape under the profiles, the wool slabs in the frame, the filled socket holes and the perimeter strip around the pipes. The photos go into the weekly report and the handover file. How soundproofing works alongside waterproofing and thermal insulation on the same wall is explained in the overview of all kinds of insulation.

How much soundproofing in Batumi costs

Framed wall soundproofing with materials costs 160–215 ₾ per m²: wool, profiles, tape and two layers of plasterboard. A ceiling on acoustic hangers costs more, 205–275 ₾ per m², because the work is overhead and there are more hangers. A floating screed on a mat comes to 120–170 ₾ per m².

We measure each surface we line: a 4 m wall with a 2.8 m ceiling gives about 11 m². Moving sockets, stripping finished surfaces and frameless panels push the price up, and work in a black or white frame apartment, while the walls are open, costs less. The final cost is set after the site measurement and once the estimate is agreed.