What Can You Do About an Echoing Room?

Flooring

• Choose flooring that will not bounce sound back. In churches, to enhance the acoustics from the choir at the front, the area is surrounded with wood or tile flooring. This bounces the singers' voices off the floors and out to the congregation, as noted by Lance Moore in "Firm Foundations: An Architect and a Pastor Guide to Your Church Construction." To reduce the echoing heard by those in the pew, carpeted flooring is used. Adapt this to your home and replace tile or wood flooring with carpeting where possible. If you cannot replace the entire floor, add throw rugs or area rugs to absorb some of the sound.

Wall Coverings

• Just as sound bounces off wood or tile floors, it will reflect off walls made of hard materials such as paneling, wood or tile. Parallel walls also cause a problem with echoing. These problems are solved in churches with acoustical panels or banners hung on the walls to absorb some of the sound, according to Moore. This problem is enhanced in areas with tiles around the walls such as kitchens or bathrooms where waterproof tile is the preferred wall option. In a bathroom or kitchen, keep large towels hanging on a towel rack to absorb sound and to keep them handy for drying your hands. Using a cloth shower curtain over a vinyl liner and keeping it closed will also help to absorb echoing noises in a bathroom.

Furnishings

• Hard surfaces will bounce sound around the room and produce an echo, but if you incorporate softer surfaces in your furniture with irregular shapes, you can deaden some of the echoing effect. In "The Healthy Home Handbook: Eco-Friendly Design," Alan Berman recommends adding plush upholstery furnishings and cushions to a room. Bring more fabric into your furnishings to reduce home echos such as adding padding to wooden stools in the kitchen or putting plush terry cloth rugs in the bathroom.

Window Treatments

• Bare glass can echo sounds from inside the home. Cover the windows with thick drapes and keep them closed to absorb excess sound. Long, thick drapes are best for reducing echoes because they produce a larger expanse on the wall where sound cannot echo from, but even small, cafe curtains on a kitchen window are better than no window coverings.

Plants

• In "The New Natural House Book: Creating A Healthy, Harmonious, and Ecologically Sound Home," David Pearson suggests lining the front of your home with plants to absorb street noise. This can even be incorporated into many rooms of the house by adding a potted plant in the room in front of a large, echoing wall.