Open floor plans have stayed for so long and are still trending because they ensure floods of natural light and spaciousness in homes. These designs offer easy movement across different corners while providing optimum connectivity. Whether you enjoy hosting family gatherings or entertaining your guests, you can trust the concept to make all your efforts worth it. But there is one challenge. While everyone goes about their lives with excitement in this floor plan, sound can add to the woes. Just like as you move smoothly from one corner to another, noise can also travel easily and invade your mental peace.
However, you don’t need to feel disappointed. You can control echoes in your open floor home theme by adding noise absorbing features, such as thick surfaces, soft materials, and so on. Let’s explore these ideas a bit for more understanding.
Home furnishings
Using soft furnishings can be of great help in this matter if you are not aware. You may wonder how you can eliminate this problem when you cannot entirely do away with hard surfaces, such as doors, windows, and other such things. While that can be a valid concern, you don’t need to stress about it. There are solutions for this as well, which you will get to learn about in a while. Coming back to the idea of using soft furnishings, you must know that these can control noise to a great extent instead of reflecting it as hard materials.
When you work on this area, you can start with the basic surfaces first. If you have budget constraints, you will need to fix the echo once and for all. So, consider having well-insulated walls, less cabinetry, soft flooring, etc. Plus, the decorative items can also play a crucial part in this. For example, your cabinet doors can include fabric inserts, and you can place a fabric-covered tack board over the kitchen counter. Wallpaper and backing can also be fabric-based. If your wardrobes have doors, you can replace them with a curtain. Covering hardwood surfaces under carpets or rugs can also be thoughtful.
Besides, you can add fabric furnishings in other areas also for decorative purposes. Its main job will be to reduce sound, though. Hence, with this awareness, you can use soft materials and furnishings wherever possible. Do you worry about spending money? You don’t have to lose your sleep over this if you are a little creative person. You can achieve a lot within a small budget. To be precise, acoustic panels and fabrics on your walls will interrupt the sound from traveling to another corner. If you wish to save more, install canvas painting or quilt for this specific function.
Leading interior designers recommend using upholstered furniture, such as upholstered bar stools, in the home to deal with sound problems. Treating windows and wall arts with fabric is also useful. At the same time, you can slip foam sheets under sofas, chairs, and ottomans for a better acoustic system in your house.
Some homes rely on sound panels to do the job in their living area. Since these are customizable, you don’t have to think twice about maintaining your place’s modern aesthetics. You can opt for sound panels with art images, for example, to bask in utility and visual appeal. The best sites for sound panel installation can be walls or ceilings. It can control noise even in the entertainment room. If you want to make your experience enjoyable, opt for adding depths and dimensions through colorful designs.
Hard surfaces
While colorful panels and soft materials can be a fantastic addition to a room, you cannot entirely do away with hard surfaces. Some of them include storage spaces, doors, etc. Still, you can achieve a lot of success by designing them well. To be precise, you can think of removing hollow-core doors. These can be cost-effective, but they cannot control sound. So it is better to move on to solid-core doors. The dense doors will help you optimize noise reduction.
Furthermore, in open floor plans, living areas consist of many parts, such as kitchen, dining section, etc. Select your kitchen appliances carefully if you wish to stop noise transference between these spaces. For example, dishwashers and sinks can be a trouble. So when you shop for them, look for something that offers noise control. You can explore stainless steel, composite granite, and granite farmhouse and apron designs from Kraus. Along with attractive configuration and superior performance, the kitchen sinks come equipped with sound-proof technology to avoid noise created by water streams or dishes knocking the bottom.
Also, cabinets with doors can be a problem as sound quickly travels through these hard surfaces. You can replace cabinetry with cubbies and shelves to deal with this. Arranging your ingredients and kitchenware on floating shelves and cubbies can be fun. At the same time, you will get an opportunity to flaunt your taste with elan, which otherwise would have remained shut behind the doors.
When it comes to designing or renovating a home, people often miss the acoustic part. Their primary focus remains on functionality, beauty, and quality. The sound issue comes only later. But this is not a favorable situation to be in as you would have already added a lot of things that lead to a noisy house. Delayed discovery can only be disappointing and heartbreaking for the simple fact that you may have spent your entire budget and stretched it a bit too. And now, you cannot afford to put more money into this.
Hence, it would be best if you made sound-proofing or prevention your priority, especially when your home has an open floor design. It will allow you to distribute your funds in a way that all the issues get addressed. From the choice of doors to appliances to soft furnishings to artwork to furniture, you can determine everything to align with your primary concerns, such as sound control, aesthetics, functionality, and design. You will not need to spend extra from your savings to achieve these desirable features.
