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Comment by tschwimmer | Hacker News Reader

Something I'm surprised that nobody's mentioned yet are the acoustics of a wooden building. Wood is less dense when compared to concrete and (at least in older buildings) there are significant air gaps between ceiling and floorboards of the floor above it. As anyone who's lived in an SF Victorian will tell you even regular walking can be perceived as loud by the person below. Before I'd consider living in a wooden building, I'd have to be convinced that the noise isolation would be sufficient. I wonder if it's been accounted for properly in these new buildings.

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As someone living in a modern wood building I can tell you that this is really not a problem anymore. Our floors are filled with anhydrite, they are solid.

Only when the kids upstairs are _really_ wild you can hear their steps.

As someone living in a wooden house, I can say it's still problem.

Even walking barefooted upstairs can be heard from downstairs. Floorboards creak and make noise.

Only places that don't make this noise are the bathroom and kitchen, which have tiled concrete floors.

How old a house?

I don't know, TBH, I rented it this year. It has been completely renovated 5 years ago.

I'd guess around 20 (-ish).

Surprisingly, wood construction never really stopped improving and even picked up in the past decade or two. A renovation would not touch the core construction or noise. In order to make it even a little quieter you'd have to rip up the floor down to the joists and install a new subfloor.

Innovations like engineered lumber, PEX and high R insulation have made a world of difference since my habitat for humanity days.

>As someone living in a wooden house, I can say it's still problem.

Note how the parent said "modern wooden house" (though that also implies "expensively-ish insulated" I think).

Don't confuse wooden building and wooden floors. The frame materials are a separate issue from how the flooring is implemented

Creaking floorboards can be solved by attaching the floors more securely. Just screw them down. Usually it is caused by wood moving against nails.

Correct. Most squeaky wood floors and stairways, etc., were just assembled poorly and you can actually fix them in situ with finish screws. I recommend the #8 GRK finish screws @ 2.5 inch length.

Either find your biggest (heaviest) friend to stand on the spot before you insert the screw OR find a way to jam the floor down from the ceiling. You lock the floorboard in place, fully compressed, and then seal it in place with the screw(s).

For new wooden floors, I highly recommend a layer of cork between the floorboards and subfloor for a variety of reasons ... insulation, noise, squeak avoidance, etc. I would not build a wooden floor without that layer.

There are a half dozen ways to silence a squeaky floor. Nobody does them because it's an expense and hassle and they don't mind the noise.

The more difficult problem, reverberation and sound travel, is really a simple acoustics problem. If you have something that makes noise and there is nothing but a big gaping box with flat sides for it to reverberate in, then you're going to hear stuff.

Often the simplest solution is to install carpeting. But if a tenant prefers wood floor, you can install sound-deadening insulation between the subfloor and finished floor, or subfloor and lower ceiling.

How 'modern' are we talking about? In the mid to late '00s I lived in a new, wood apartment building and the noise was unbearable. You could hear doors slamming from below and people walking around above you.

It depends a lot on where you are. Warm parts of the US will build houses with 2x4s and uninsulated interior walls+floors. In the northern US the exterior and even sometimes interior walls are 2x6 and have high quality insulation in the walls, floors and ceilings, plus nowadays there's quite a thick layer of foam on the outside. The extra strength and rigidity does a ton of work attenuating noise from other parts of the house, and the walls are much harder to transmit sound through.

GP poster lives in Switzerland. US construction quality is weak, and building code would be nice to have. It may come as a surprise to those who have never been to the States to see just how awful housing in America is, on the contrary, those in America who have never been to Europe will be surprised to see how nice a multifamily building can be when it's properly constructed.

This one is emblematic of US construction: https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Lake-Whitney-Cliff-House-M...

What?? Surely you can come up with a better example than a house built on a collapsing cliff that was intentionally burned down.

Edit: your comment would be more helpful if it referenced improved construction techniques and materials that are commonly used in Europe that haven't been adopted in the US.

The point is that even at that price point it's still wood frame and sheetrock. It's just fancier finishings, but nothing like the anhydrite floor with soundproofing layer that decouples the floor from the rest of the building that someone further up had mentioned.

Spent a month last year in Spain and didn't see anything special about their construction. I'll resist making ludicrous generalizations though.

Spain is Spain. It's closer culturally to Romania than to Switzerland.

The house was build in 2013, thickly isolated, following the Minergie P standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minergie

I live in a wooden house. It isn't the wood that is the problem but the way it is used. My house is in Norway and was built in 1950. The floorboards are tongued and grooved pine about three inches wide and two inches thick. Unless someone is wearing shoes upstairs I hardly hear a thing. Of course in a building occupied by multiple groups I wouldn't be able to enforce the no shoes indoors rule. But I swore i would never live in the same building as another family ever again after enduring two years of loud record playing from below but that was in a concrete building.

By the way, is it the same with high rise, glass towers? I live in a mid size (20 floors) modern-ish building (1999) with excellent acoustic insulation (as in spotless, never heard a whisper from a neighbor). But the building is made of concrete with some windows. I am comparing that to high rise towers (50-60 floors) where you only have a thin layer of concrete between floors but no concrete between apartments (probably to keep the weight down). Wouldn't you expect these towers to have structurally poor acoustic insulation?

Keep in mind this is not wood as in trees cut to parts. These buildings almost always use CLT - cross laminated timber. So there are no air gaps to speak of.

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