Living in a house with lots of other people be they family or friends can be a lot of fun and a great way to make sure you never feel to bored or lonely. At the same time though you’re likely to find that it can also often not be very peaceful – and the more people you have in your home at any one time the less peace and quiet you are going to get and noisier it’s going to be.
A great example of this is getting up for work in the morning. If you aren’t the first to wake up, then you may well find that your sleep is disturbed by your friends and family getting ready in the morning in the kitchen and making their breakfast/packed lunch. Kitchens can be noisy places and if you sleep near this can be more effective than any alarm clock in waking you up. So how do you go about ensuring you can sleep soundly and that your own preparations aren’t going to wake anyone else up? Simple – you get to work on making the kitchen more insulated so that it absorbs more of that sound. Here we will look at some ways to make your kitchen quieter.
Adding Insulation
Adding insulation to the room itself will immediately make your kitchen quieter. Often we think of insulation in our ceilings and our wall cavities as purely a way to save on our heating bill and be more eco friendly. Actually though, anything that insulates against the cold will also be more effective at absorbing sound. So add insulation to your kitchen walls and ceiling and make sure you have double glazing and that sound will be contained far more effectively.
Cabinets
You can do a lot of good with a piece of cork, but here’s one quick use for it – cut off a few slithers and then using some blue tack or some glue, attach those slithers to the insides of your kitchen cabinet doors. This way when you shut the cupboards the cork will absorb the sound of the impact rather than letting it echo throughout the room. Now you won’t need to worry about gingerly shutting those cabinets. Another solution to this problem is to invest in ‘soft close’ cabinets next time you renovate the room.
Washing Up
When you’re washing plates and bowls you’ll make a lot of noise as they clatter together. The solution to this is to provide yourself with something soft to put them down on – and you can do this by using a rubber mat by the side of the sink. This will absorb moisture, but it will also absorb the sound when you stack the plates there.
Chairs
The chairs in your kitchen are likely to make something of a scraping noise whenever you drag them, so an obvious solution is to add ‘chair slippers’. These are soft attachments that go on each of your chair legs to cushion them and this makes moving them around much quieter.