Every Sauna Is Built Twice
Once in the workshop, where there is a roof, good light and every tool, and once on your footings, where there is usually rain. Doing the hard part indoors is why the second build takes a day.
Ten to fourteen weeks from the signed drawing to the first fire on site.
From Drawing to First Fire
- The drawing.
Plan, elevation and section, with the door, the window and which way the bench faces. Nothing is cut until you have signed it.
- The timber.
Spruce for the frame, aspen or alder for the hot room, all dried to the same moisture so nothing moves later.
- Frame and walls.
Built on the workshop floor, square to the millimetre, with the joints cut by hand where they show.
- Insulation and foil.
Wool between the studs and foil over it, taped at every seam, so the heat stays in the room and the damp stays out of the walls.
- Panelling and benches.
Every bench edge rounded and sanded, every screw hidden from skin.
- Stove and chimney.
Fitted by our chimney fitter, with the right clearances and a heat shield behind it.
- The first fire, in the workshop.
The sauna is heated, tested and smelled. Then every board is numbered in pencil and it comes apart.
- Rebuilt on site and fired again.
On your footings, in a day, with the second fire lit before we drive home.
The part of the job he would talk about all day if you let him.
The Stove, the Stones and the Löyly
You can build a beautiful sauna with a bad stove, and it will be a beautiful room that nobody wants to sit in.
Everything else in the sauna exists to serve the stove. The size of the room decides how big a stove it needs, the stove decides how many stones it holds, and the stones decide the löyly, the wave of steam that comes off them when you throw water on. A good löyly is soft and arrives a moment after the water hits the stones, rolling down from the ceiling. A bad one is sharp and dry and stings your ears, and you can tell in one ladle which kind of sauna you are in.
So we size the stove to the room, not to the catalogue, and we fill it with more stones than most people expect, around sixty kilos in a garden sauna. Stones hold heat, and a stove full of them gives an even löyly all evening instead of a burst at seven and nothing by nine. We use rough, dark, split stones that have been through a fire before, because round river stones crack and smooth ones shed water before it turns to steam.
The benches are set so the upper bench is about a metre below the ceiling, where the löyly arrives, and so your feet on the lower bench are above the top of the stove. Get that wrong and the heat sits on your head while your feet are cold, which is the most common fault in saunas built by people in a hurry.
Then there is the air. A sauna needs a little fresh air coming in low behind the stove and stale air leaving high on the opposite wall, and the size of those two holes is worth an afternoon's thought. Too small and the room feels heavy after twenty minutes. Too big and the löyly leaves before it reaches you.
Every stone gets restacked by hand in the spring, every few years, because the small ones crumble and the big ones settle. Most people never think about the stones at all, which is fine, as long as someone does.
Antti
Five Things the Workshop Turns Down
- Infrared cabins. A sauna has stones and löyly.
- Saunas assembled from imported kit panels.
- Chemically treated timber anywhere inside the hot room.
- Sites a lorry with a crane cannot reach, except across the ice.
- Building in July, when the workshop is on holiday like everyone else.
Delivery, and the ice, are on the delivery page.