Soundproofing spray foam insulation in Wetaskiwin is work on buildings that are already good at stopping one kind of noise and poor at stopping another, because plaster on lath and solid framing behave nothing like a modern house.
Old houses stop voices and carry footsteps
A house of this era is a set of separate rooms with doors, plaster walls with real mass, and solid lumber floor joists. Airborne noise does not travel through that easily, so voices and television are rarely the complaint. What does travel is impact: footsteps overhead, a door closing, something dropped upstairs, all of it moving through the structure rather than the air. That distinction matters because absorption in a cavity addresses the first and does relatively little for the second, and a household should hear that before spending rather than after.
Suites, and a floor that was never a separation
A great many of these houses have had a suite downstairs at some point, and the floor between the two was a floor rather than a separation between households. It was never detailed for sound, the stair connecting the two levels is frequently open, and the ducts serve both. Where a lower level is genuinely occupied separately the honest scope is the floor, the stair and the services rather than any single wall, and the expectation has to be set accordingly.
The paths in an old house are almost never the wall
Sound in one of these travels around the plaster rather than through it: a floor cavity that runs the length of the building, a stair open at both ends, a chimney chase, gaps around doors that never fitted well, and a cold air return that connects two rooms directly. At least one of those is usually doing more than any wall, none of them is fixed by insulation, and finding which is a single visit that decides whether there is a job worth doing at all.
A room with mass in the walls starts from further ahead
The one advantage of working on a building like this is that the surfaces already have weight, and weight is the thing a modern partition has to buy. Plaster on lath is heavier than a sheet of drywall, the studs are closer together and the floor joists are solid timber rather than engineered web. Filling those cavities builds on something rather than starting from nothing, which is why a modest scope in an old Wetaskiwin house frequently gets further than the same scope would in a new one, and it is worth knowing before the budget is set.
Soundproofing Spray Foam Insulation Wetaskiwin: The Covering Requirement
Open cell is the correct product for sound because it stays soft and fills the cavity completely, where the denser closed cell used elsewhere on this site reflects noise rather than absorbing it. Where the foam goes into an occupied Wetaskiwin room it is covered by a thermal barrier, which in practice is the drywall or plaster going back on, so the making good belongs in the quote from the start. More on thermal barrier vs ignition barrier.
Soundproofing Spray Foam Insulation Wetaskiwin: Common Questions
Why is it harder to stop footsteps than voices? That is normal in an old house. Impact travels through structure and is the hardest thing to treat.
What matters most for soundproofing a suite downstairs? Then the floor, the stair and the ducts matter more than any wall, and the standard is higher.
Will opening a wall fix it? Frequently not. In these houses the sound is going around the plaster rather than through it.
Size the assembly with the R-value calculator, then get a free Wetaskiwin quote. More on Soundproofing Spray Foam Insulation Alberta.