The sauna cottage

Ground work

The north-west corner of the garden will be the perfect spot for our upcoming 12 square meters sauna cottage, but the ground needs to be leveled, and I'm not going to work this tough mix of stones and dirt by hand 😃

I thought the ground was "basically" leveled but it turned out we have a difference of 4 dm

Every boy's dream, a 900 kg excavator! Yes, it's as fun as it looks

My daughter Frida got to try it too

Digging the cable canal for the electricity. My, there are a good number of roots here

Work done. Wonderful machine

Thank you Bobcat gonna miss you very much

Time to unload

Groundwork done 😃

Constructing the walls

This cottage is made up of knot timber, a classic way of constructing houses without using any nails or screws

Delivery day! I ordered a kit from northern Sweden (Sorselestugan.se) so someone has done some thinking 😃

Here's the material for the cottage itself

This is the wood-burning sauna stove -a 24,5kW Harvia unit with water boiler. Yes, we're making this sauna in the classic style Finns have been making saunas for centuries

Luckily I have friends joining. Thank you guys (including those of you that didn't make it into this shot)

Laying the first lap of knot timbered wood.

Adding support beams for the floor. Now we can continue with the walls

Amazing, not one single nail or screw. Just swinging the sledge hammer to fit each lap of wood with the previous layer

Hi Jesper!

Hi Mike!

We were not super lucky with the weather. It was raining on and off multiple times

Walls and structure for the roof finished

Making the roof

The roof of this will be made up of shingles

underlay cardboard for the roof (trusting Google Translate on this one)

And then roofing shingles

There are hundreds of hidden nails securing these shingles. This tedious process took 2 days.

Paint work

The exterior has now received a layer of
primer

Paint job done and windows and door installed

Installing the stove

Time to install the stove. We use a protective steel shell so we can locate the stove closer to the walls

First an initial heating of the stove to burn out paint residues and such

Time to install the chimney after careful measurement. I don't want to fail this one. Where's the undo button if I get it wrong?

This should make a circular 420mm hole

Ensuring we have the required 100mm margin between the insulated chimney and combustible material

Once the cover plates are installed, we're done from the inside

Installing the rain collar (?) and rain hat. Please allow funny wordings, I'm a Swedish IT guy so this terminology is way out of my comfort zone 😃

Installing the stones. We're getting close now...

Adding a 3:rd window

Making the benches

We make the sauna shelves from aspen as it's less hot and doesn't emit any resin

I love access to many local hardware stores 😃

This is my own design as I wanted an L-shape instead of two straight benches

Done. This was great fun. I recommend a good electrical screwdriver, jigsaw and miter saw

The result

If I could only could convey the wonderful smell of wood. I hope you get the picture that this is a place for relaxation anyway 😃

The stove has a 30L water boiler next to it so one can clean oneself in warm water. We just let the water out on the gravel ground beneath the floor

Next to the sauna, a room to relax, cool down and change clothes

Cooling down is important 😃

Celebrating the new sauna!

Construction work and celebrating takes its toll on me. Here relaxing with our adorable kittens

Making a terrace

The sauna cottage isn't complete until we have a terrace next to it

I'll be making a 12m2 terrace out of 120x28mm wood, supported by 120x45 mm beams (that's 5x2" I take it)

After leveling the ground somewhat I install a 4x2" support bean alongside the cottage

I then make a frame for the supporting construction

The next step is to add supporting beams every 600mm (24")

The beams are supported by beam shoes. Very handy

Adding support for the vertical floorboards and arranging the horizontal floorboards with 2mm distance

After around 500 screws later (thank you screwdriver), the terrace is complete

Some final images

Reparing the lawn with 40 40 liter bags of dirt

The final result. I now just need to water the recently planted grass seeds