This is our Finnish sauna–it looks like it belongs on the Hobit Movie set. I grew up near Seattle where there were several hills notably Norway Hill and Finn Hill–I won’t go into how these hills got names but there were lots of saunas built behind the main houses. This winter we plan to use ours a lot but we need to make some improvements first. We demolish the roof and gut the insides and find that all the perlons are rotten as well as the back wall.

Next is the problem of rebuilding the roof–we use a similar plan as the main house and cut a few small trees in the woods for replacement logs. After rebuilding the log structure, we add a new roof–we’ve all the left-overs from the main house.

Here’s the final result….we can’t wait for the first snowfall:

To take a true Finnish sauna, we heat the stove inside for about an hour. This stove has a crib on top full of round beach rocks. After the rocks get hot, we throw water on them to create steam. True Finns slap each other’s backs with birch branches, then roll in the snow–sounds fun, huh? …stay tuned as we work on the house logs next.