Hello All,

I'm glad to see this is such an active group! Hopefully someone here
can help me.

I live in a 121 home residential complex. It happens that a road runs
behind the row of homes in the complex where my house is. On that same
road outside the complex there is a small community of about 10 homes.
Unfortunately we hear everything and we are directly behind one of the
nosiest houses on the block. Ofcourse there is the party from time to
time which doesn't bother me too much but I can even hear my neighbors
having a conversation on their porch in regular voices.

To start our back wall is almost 2 meters high from the road. However
due to the fact that our property is raised up, on our side of the
fence we only see about 1 meter of this wall. On top of the wall I
have an arched iron fence that goes up another 2 meters in the middle
and about 1 meter on the sides where it attaches to 2 meter columns on
either side of the fence..


What do I want to accomplish:

- Reduce the talking I hear from these neighbors.

- Attempt to reduce the yelling I hear from the neighbors.

- Attempt to reduce the music when they have parties.


Really the only thing I cannot do is change the "architectural
harmony" of the complex, meaning I cannot remove the iron fence and
replace it with a solid structure.

In asking around I have found that these options might work for me:

1. Build a concrete block wall inside my property directly behind the
existing wall. The problem will be that unless I can get 2/3 of the
residents to agree to a slight modification of the architectural
harmony I cannot put the wall straight accross at the top, it would
need to follow the arch of the iron fence, so I would only gain a
meter of sound protection.

2. Build an iron frame, wrap both sides with 1" Concrete Board and and
fill it with Fiber Glass insulation.

3. Buy a ready made sound reduction solution (the ones they use to
block noise from highways) unfortunately this is quite expensive
because I live in Costa Rica and there is nothing here for that so
i'll need to bring it from the states and just the shipping will kill
me.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Nick