“I don’t know if you’ve ever have had insomnia?” Stephen asked. “If you haven’t, let me assure you, you don’t want to. It’s terrible. No matter what you do, you just can’t get to sleep. I’ve tried all the advice for insomnia – no screen time for at least an hour, meditation, Chamomile tea – and nothing helps. It seems like I go days and days without a real satisfying sleep, and then, eventually I just pass out from sheer exhaustion – and then the problem is that I’ll only sleep for a little while before something happens that wakes me up.”
Something often arrives in the form of noise from a neighbor’s yard. “Don’t get me wrong – they’re great people, and they’re not doing anything out of the ordinary. Someone closes a car door, I’m wide awake. It’s that sort of thing.” Stephen has tried sleeping wearing noise cancelling headphones – “Talk about uncomfortable!” and sleeping with a white noise machine. “They say you don’t hear the white noise, I heard the white noise,” Stephen laughed. “I don’t want another noise drowning out the first noise. I want quiet.”
“One of my co-workers is having her home done over,” Steven said. “It’s been quite a process – she’s been talking about it for like a year and a half at this point. You kind of tone it out, you know? But then she said something that caught my attention. After they had replacement windows installed in their bedroom, they couldn’t hear the cars going by on their street anymore.”
High quality replacement windows do offer some level of noise reduction. This is a side benefit of their highly efficient design. The multiple panes of glass, high quality sills, superior seals and pockets of insulating gas that keep out cold and moisture also buffer sound. “I figured it couldn’t hurt to try,” Stephen said. “So I called around to see how much it would cost to have replacement windows installed in Hingham. They came out and put the new windows in. Instantly, the bedroom was warmer and more comfortable – I guess I hadn’t realized how much of a draft there really was in that room!” As for Steven’s insomnia issue, some progress has been made. “Getting to sleep is still a problem,” he explained. “But now I find I’m not waking up as easily once I’m asleep. It might be because the room is more comfortable, and it might be because now the room is actually quiet. Either way, I like the improvement!”