Building a Sauna

So my personal project was to try and build a sauna. I have never built anything nearly as big as a sauna before and except for the bench I built this spring my experience in building is generally very limited. The idea came to me as a suggestion or a strong implication that it would be nice to have a sauna at the farm and that there is not enough time at the moment for them . And since I have wanted to expand my rather limited knowledge in build I thought this would be a great personal project. Just a quick note; I am not so stupid to think that building a sauna would be something easy or fast in any way, hence the try in the first sentence. I also took some time to think over if I really wanted to take on this huge project, which you now can see I decided for. After deciding on it I directly started to sketch the whole construction and dream about how nice it will look in the end. This part dragged on for a long time but at some point in the summer I got the first building material which was the thick beams for the base construction. Sawing and preparing them were quite a lot of detailed work and there were some swear words involved several times. After just starting to prepare them I went home for my vacation which meant a long break from sauna work. But when I came back I had a lot of energy to continue and manage to finish the sawing and with some help put all the pieces together and form the base of the construction.

The next step was to put on the floor. It was quite straight forward and made it look so much more like a small house immediately. After the floor I began to put in all the beams in the walls and it felt like for everyone I but I realized I needed one more for some reason. For example, is it apparently very important to have beams going across for all the stuff you want to put up on the outer walls like hooks and hinges, something I absolutely thought about in the planning. I had a really good moment at this time when I could walk through where the door were gonna be and look out through the hole where the window were gonna be for the first time .

With all the beams in place it was time for the inner walls. I had some help at this time so it went quite fast, although my right arm was dead afterwards because I needed to handsaw all of the boars so make the joints straight. When I had put up all the inner walls it was finally time for the benches which I enjoyed making. They turned out very nice as well after covering them with boards. After some debating we also decided to put in insulation in the walls which meant some extra work, but I think it’s really worth it in the end not having to freeze in a sauna. With the insolation it was time for the outer layer of boards which made it look like a tiny house. With all the walls finished it was time to drill into them in order to make holes for ventilation and chimney which not at all felt completely wrong to do. With all the holes made in the nice, even walls I felt like doing some finishing touches like putting a frame around the window. That really made the sauna look less like a construction site and more like a finished project. The next huge thing to do was the roof which I fortunately got help with to put on. With the roof it already looked almost finished with the most noticeable thing missing being the door. The door was a bit tricky to do because I wanted insulation in it so it had to be double layered. But in the end it looked really good. When leaving the farm now in some days there are still some things left to do but I still feel good about how far I got.

When writing this it feels like the whole project seems straightforward and easy when in reality the journey was filled with bumps, twists and turns. I also put in so many hours into this and put so much effort and thought into every single detail. Building this sauna has been such an experience for me and I feel like I learned incredibly much by doing it. I am so proud of the sauna which turned out so much better than the dreams I had in the spring and I also feel so grateful that I got this chance to do it.