How to Build a Sauna
A Survivors Guide
Last summer I built a sauna. It’s true! Well, to be truthful, it was the joint effort of my partner and me because there is NO WAY I could have done it on my own!
Why a sauna? Because I live in Finland, the home of the sauna! My partner’s family has a summer cottage in the countryside and we decided it needed a sauna because no Finnish household should be without one!
After some investigation we decided that we could probably build it ourselves, because, I mean, how hard could it be?!
So we bought a kind of IKEA kit sauna and started.
I’m now going to jump straight to the end. It took ONE HUNDRED HOURS! 100. Yep. The guy we had asked who was actually a builder had said 40. Because he was a builder. And knew from experience. Greenhorns that we were, we thought, “we are two, surely even with our lack of experience it won’t take longer than 40…?”
How wrong we were!
But what fun we had! (Well…most of the time, anyway.)
It started with getting a whole pile of wood from the forest… NAH! Just kidding! It was actually a kit delivered to the site. Everything was in the delivery; wood to build it with, doors, windows, stove, chimney, even bits of wood to fill the holes in the package. Because that last one was totally annoying, how were we to know there were a whole lot of extra bits? But I digress…
The foundation is cement blocks, then we simply put the first layer down using all the correct pieces of wood. Except only SOME were actually labeled. I mean, in my opinion, IKEA directions usually have pretty clear diagrams. These were in size minus 3 font and the drawings were so small we could barely see them.
We managed to work out the basics, like layering the timber. It’s kind of like wood Lego. It all fits together. You just have to supply the screws. And here is where it gets tricky. I think they assume in the instructions that you have built things before because they had steps like “now screw in the screws.”
Which may seem obvious if screwing things is your job, but for us, it was like this:
“Ummm, so, when they say ‘screw in the screws’ is there anything in the instructions that say where? Or what type of screws? Or how many? I mean, what intervals do we screw them in?”
“Hmmm, doesn’t seem to be anything on this sheet? Anything on that booklet, or the other sheet? Or that huge fold-out map thing?”
“Nope.”
“Oh.”
We managed to build walls. And a roof. And put windows and doors in. And build a floor! It started to look like it was a building.
Meanwhile, we were both working so it meant that we had to do the building at night and on the weekends. Luckily the long spring/summer nights meant it was light until 11 pm so we dragged ourselves out to build for a few hours every night.
The whole family got involved too! We had guests from Australia (my dad and his partner), my mother-in-law (whose building knowledge far outweighed ours so was very helpful), my sister-in-law who helped us redo a whole section when we realized we had missed some planks in a key spot, and my cousin and partner who were lucky enough to arrive when we put the sauna stove in so could have the very first sauna.
I learned lots of new skills, like the name for tools and things in Swedish, how to fit things together, I even made my own hooks for towels with bits of wood (juniper) that blew down in the huge storm we had in February 2019.
The result?
A beautiful sauna, by the edge of the water, which can be used any time of the year. We can jump in the water or roll in the snow!
Would I ever build another sauna? NO WAY! It took so long (did I say it took 100 HOURS!), our muscles ached, at one point I actually thought I never wanted to see it again.
But we did it. And now we can enjoy it.
Lisa moved to Finland two years ago and has embraced life there. She writes poetry and about life in her new home (plus some crazy satire!). If you’d like to keep in touch, please do!
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