Sound proofing a home for home office

I live in a ranch house and it's open concept, laminate floors (no carpet). Any movement is bounced all over the place. 3 kids in a 3 bedroom house so unfortunately no room for a office, I occasionally use my bedroom, but not a big fan of working where you sleep. The attic is not finished, no heat, no windows, and very little flooring. The basement is wide open and unfinished but the sounds of kids walking, talking sounds like a bowling alley.  I am not a builder and nor do I have any friends or family that could help with building. The quotes I received to remodel my basement are in the $90k range which I could just buy a new house or rent a office. So I started searching for ideas and putting a sound proof room together. I found some pre-fab Professional Acoustic Soundproof Office Phone Booth Prefab Houses Outdoor Office Soundproof Pods For Public Privacy Meeting Hive have any ideas that I might be missing?

There's more information in here about acoustics than you can shake a stick at:
https://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/index.php

The two-leaf mass air mass info is what you want to learn about.

Cone of Silence

EDIT:  Read it again, and John's reply, and I see now what you're trying to do.  Hope you get some good responses.

Super cheap and not a perfect solution but it should take away the bowling alley sounds in the basement.  

Is your basement exposed rafters like this? 

Use blankets like these which are 8 ft x 6 ft 8 in.  At $75 each, three or $225 might make you a nice corner space.  But it will make a very dark space so know you will need a lot of light inside the corner you create.  You might also need some pink insulation to the ceiling of the office space to reduce the sounds coming from the floor above.  

In reply to CJ : Talk about a mouth breather 

In reply to John Welsh : It looks almost exactly like that but it's cement blocks. If you bounce a basketball it reverberates all around, so I can use that as a test and obviously the kids bouncing up and down on the ground floor. I am not a electrician and there are only 3 bulbs light in the basement. Would would you suggest as far as lighting?

What if, instead of building out the entire basement, you just build an office room in the basement? Just a ~10x10 box.

Wood frame, door, drywall, pink insulation foam, area rugs, a couple electrical outlets. Give yourself a small area to heat/cool. Drywall and pink foam will be good insulation.

Cut down the cost by substantially narrowing your scope. Do as much as you can by yourself. Hire experts for the few things you don't want to deal with.

I wouldn't know how to plan for putting up a separate room, let alone the dynamics of air flow, ventilation, constructing the walls and would have to hire someone for any electrical. Here is a rough sketch of my basement.

For real sound isolation you would need to have all the sound conducting paths disconnected. Usually with a rubber component. Think of a rubber exhaust hanger supporting your ceiling from the floor above and hockey pucks holding a wood floor off of the concrete floor. That sort of thing.

But really what you want is just to knock down the sound. I would just put up a small 2x4 framed room and use some mineral wool sound absorption insulation everywhere. Tap off a main supply duct and have a return path back to the rest of the basement that dosen't have a direct line of sight. Small gaps transmit high frequency noises.

Watch some youtube videos. A hand saw and a cordless drill, and a few other hand tools could do this.

In reply to trigun7469 :

Shipping on that looks like it would kill you. Far from a perfect solution, but could you buy a cubicle setup from someone renovating an office? I would bet there's some local on Facebook or Craiglist. That and a few rugs in the basement/Acoustic panels and it might at least help. 

Without a ceiling over the work area at minimum there's still going to be plenty of sound intrusion from above.  I like the idea of framing in what amounts to a bedroom in the basement to work out of.  I wonder if that could be built in where the workbench currently is, and juggle that stuff around to make it all fit?

What's the ceiling hight in the basement?  That's what's going to dictate your options for reducing the sounds from above.

Bose noise cancelling headphones seem like a MUCH cheaper option. 

Looking at a similar situation in my basement.  The trick seems to seem insulation in the beams and then an isolater bushing between the drywall and the wood beam.  
 

Fingers crossed as I love my kids but don't want to hear them all the time.

I'm home based and my office sits directly next to the family room with the TV on an adjacent wall.  When we did work on the family room we double layered the drywall after using fiberglass insulation.  I can hear the TV if I listen for it but my clients can't hear it thru my phone.   Win.

I looked into cubicles on craigs and facebook marketplace, I found these which might be a solution, Wall Dividers however it doesn't help with the ceiling issue. 

In reply to APEowner : I believe 7-8ft, I will have to check

In reply to z31maniac : I bought MPower headset which were wirless with mic, and there was still background noise. It's hard for me to wear headphones all day long.

Sounds like its not entirely possible, but putting the kids activity space in the basement so they are stomping around on a concrete slab would cut noise transmission through the rest of the house.

Wife and I are debating converting the attached "2 car" (its really 1.5 car due to post and stair placement) garage into a play room for the kids and one ofthe major benefits is that the space would be slab on grade, so the floor booming wouldnt transmit through the whole house.

trigun7469 said:

I looked into cubicles on craigs and facebook marketplace, I found these which might be a solution, Wall Dividers however it doesn't help with the ceiling issue. 

In reply to APEowner : I believe 7-8ft, I will have to check

In reply to z31maniac : I bought MPower headset which were wirless with mic, and there was still background noise. It's hard for me to wear headphones all day long.

 

If it's 8' then you could frame a stand alone room and build a ceiling on top that doesn't touch the existing one.  If it's 7' then you'll need to do some kind of an isolation mount for the ceiling.  Something like the isoTRAX mount.

Sound proofing rooms basically comes down to making the surfaces inside the room as dense as possible and isolating them from the outside as much as possible.

In reply to trigun7469 :

Makes sense. 

The only other reasonable option is to sell the kids to pay for the basement renovation. 

In reply to z31maniac :

Then I could just use one of their rooms 

Rubber bushing isolators are very good, but also look into RC-1 metal channel furring. You'd run it perpendicular to the floor framing and hang drywall from it, with sound batt insulation in the cavities.

Maybe an 8'x8' Insulated Man shed outside? Temporary or permanent office in the basement? Lower left corner looks like the best location for a small room. Have any photos of said basement? A 'typical' 8' basement wall is 7'-9-1/2" from t.o. slab to b.o. floor system.

VolvoHeretic said:

Maybe an 8'x8' Insulated Man shed outside? Temporary or permanent office in the basement? Lower left corner looks like the best location for a small room. Have any photos of said basement? A 'typical' 8' basement wall is 7'-9-1/2" from t.o. slab to b.o. floor system.

This is what my boss did. They put in an 8'x12' or 10'x14' foot building outside. Insulated it and put a heat pump in it. So now "working from home" means a 75' walk out to the front door to the building and keeps all the work stuff out of the home.

Duke said:

Rubber bushing isolators are very good, but also look into RC-1 metal channel furring. You'd run it perpendicular to the floor framing and hang drywall from it, with sound batt insulation in the cavities.

 

This seems like a smart suggestion.  I have no first-hand experience with the product, just looked at some videos, seems like exactly the right plan for the ceiling in question.

Why don't you let the kids play in the basement and you work upstairs?