I’m originally from Finland, the promised land of sauna, but I’ve been living abroad for nearly 20 years. I’ve missed the tradition immensely, so I decided to build a proper sauna on my backyard.
The project took about 6 months to plan and 2 months to build. The overall budget is unknown to me as I’ve decided that I don’t want to know. Let’s just say that it was not cheap. I even drove 1000km to Finland to pick up some of the parts I couldn’t get shipped or weren’t able to find locally.
Hi there! I love your build. I am most intrigued by the floor. I have 3 questions:
1) where did you get the gutter drain?
2) how did you slope the tongue and groove flooring? Just simply by offsetting the floor joists at increasingly lower levels toward the drain?
3) have you had any issues with this flooring method since install?
I couldn’t find an online shop which would ship the gutter, so I drove to Finland and bought it there. My family lives there, so the 1000km drive was a good summer vacation trip with the kids.
The floor slope was simply done with different height joists. I cut the top of the joists to the correct angle so those are level with the slope. There are pictures in the build log showing this. (edit: I actually didn’t add the pictures of cutting the angles to the joists, but it was simply done to 3 and 6 degrees depending of the side.)
I haven’t had any issues with the floor. This is a very traditional way of building sauna floors, so I don’t expect any issues either.
2 Comments
Connor
December 15, 2023 at 04:58Hi there! I love your build. I am most intrigued by the floor. I have 3 questions:
1) where did you get the gutter drain?
2) how did you slope the tongue and groove flooring? Just simply by offsetting the floor joists at increasingly lower levels toward the drain?
3) have you had any issues with this flooring method since install?
Thank you in advance, from Bellingham, WA USA!
Silfer
December 27, 2023 at 09:45Hi Connor,
I couldn’t find an online shop which would ship the gutter, so I drove to Finland and bought it there. My family lives there, so the 1000km drive was a good summer vacation trip with the kids.
The floor slope was simply done with different height joists. I cut the top of the joists to the correct angle so those are level with the slope. There are pictures in the build log showing this. (edit: I actually didn’t add the pictures of cutting the angles to the joists, but it was simply done to 3 and 6 degrees depending of the side.)
I haven’t had any issues with the floor. This is a very traditional way of building sauna floors, so I don’t expect any issues either.