Cedar benches......at long last!

Cedar benches! I was fortunate enough to find that Lowe's stocks 5/4 cedar decking. By selectively picking through the piles of lumber in several locations I was able to find many, almost clear cedar boards. I used these for the bench framing. Overkill perhaps, but the price was just about 1/2 that of clear cedar trim that we used for the bench tops. I think the final count was almost 25 - 5/4" x 6" x 8' boards. It's important that you fasten the bench tops from the bottom. Sounds silly, but the last thing you want to do is to sit on a 140F hot screw head when you are taking a sauna. The door in the last picture is a aromatic cedar 'sandwich' framed with VG Fir. The 1/4" cedar closet lining boards were glued to 1/4" birch plywood foundation on both sides of the door. This gave me a 3/4" panel with aromatic cedar on both sides. This panel was then framed out with VG Fir stiles and rails. The handles on the door came from the cement isle at Home Depot. Cement float tools have wooden handles. Take the float off and the handle is just perfect for a sauna door. There's a ball catch on the top of the door. This keeps the metal strike etc. away from your legs when you go in and out of the sauna.

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Deck Stairs

This spring we had very windy weather and a large Ash tree fell across the driveway. Perfect! Our Alaska Saw Mill came out and we made stringers and treads from that tree. A tool that was very handy is the Prazi attachment for my 8 1/4 Milwakee 'side-winder'. This small chain saw attachment was also used to cut the tapers in the gable logs. I used 1" dia oak dowels to peg the treads to the stringers then sawed them flush. The stringers meet the ground on two flat rocks I moved there for that purpose. Oh, yes. I folded up leftover shingles to place betwen the stringers and the ground to keep water from wicking into the stringers. The stringers are fastened to the deck with 1/2" x 8" lag screws. If the ground heaves due to frost the stairs may lift. If that happens I'll have to hinge the stairs at the rim joist of the deck. We'll see this winter.

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The front deck

The tiles needed time to set so I moved outside to build the front deck. The budget was getting tight so it was time to use what materials I had on hand. I also had to add two more sono-tube columns as we wanted the deck to extend along the north wall of the sauna. These I had to dig by hand. I set the piers to be inside of the front edge of the deck. I think I might want to add a small stone wall under this part. We'll see how this all looks when we get closer to the end.

Cover the slices with cement board and tile

Using a 1/4 x 1/4 trowel and modified thin set, I covered the sauna floor with 1/4" cement board. I suppose if this were a house and I wanted to make sure there were no leaks I could have glued the foam boards together at the but edges with some form of butal caulk. Since the foam board is waterproof the only places that might leak are the joints between the boards. I didn't do that here and I'm not expecting any leaks.

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Putting the slices together

Layout your pattern on the floor with a sharpie marker. Set the 2 x 4 tapered panel on the floor and using your hot wire tool just cut the board to match with the black lines on the subfloor. Label the piece and go on to the next. What the picture does not show is that all the pink insulation board is set on modified thin set and held to the floor with large plaster lath washers and screws.

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Cutting Foam Pizza

Hot wire jig for cutting rigid foam tapers.
The end result of this process will produce two 2' x 4' foam boards that are tapered from one end to the other. The slope is 1/4" to a foot. Just what I needed for the shower pan underlayment. Less some spelling errors on the annotated pictures, the whole jig cost me less than $40.00. I'm sure that a less expensive solution could be made if you have a shop with stuff hanging around.

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Make sure when you are actually cutting the board that you have plenty of air circulation. I kept my shop open at both ends so I had a good breeze happening when I did this. Not much smoke with my setup, but don't take chances with the vapor. Cutting all the material I needed was a snap. It took longer to make the jig than cut the foam.

The Shower Pan

We use about 5 gal. of water per person in the sauna. This accounts for splashing on the hot stones, washing and just dumping over your head when you get too hot. All this water has to go someplace and that place is a drain in the floor. Rustic saunas drain the water to the outside ground; we wanted a better solution so we connected the drain to to a gray water system. ( see bibliography at the end)

Usually shower pans are built with a waterproof membrane, concrete, wire mesh and more concrete. None of this appealed to me as this shower pan would be almost 8' square not the standard 3' x 3' size. Moving all that concrete made me shutter. I had to find a better way.

What was needed was a very large funnel shaped floor. The slope would be 1/4" to every one foot of run. Than means that for every foot of travel the floor would slope down a quarter of an inch. Since the drain is in the center of the room the maximum distance is 4 feet. 1/2 of eight is four and four feet of travel is one inch. The drain in the center of the room would have to be one inch lower than the edges of the room.

The problem then was how to make this slope. I thought of using tapered screed boards but that meant that I would still have to lift tons of concreted and scrape the concrete to an angel. No good. Brainstorming, I drew radiating lines from the drain to the edges of the wall and what I saw was a bunch of pizza shapes. If I could make wide tapered pizza slices! I then remembered some work I had done years before. Using a hot wire a person can cut ridged foam insulation like it was butter. Hot wire cutting of ridged foam was the answer!

Framing a sliding wall

Framing an interior wall in a log cabin requires some extra thought. The logs of this building will shrink about 1 1/2". That means that the ridge pole will be lower than it is when it was first installed, the openings for the door and windows will be smaller too; care must be taken to allow for this shrinkage or door and window frames will carry the weight of the building separating the logs. Interior walls are also effected by the outer walls settling.

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Here you can see that I've left space between the gable framing and the square interior wall below to allow the gable to settle. The interior walls are held against the log walls by first cutting a slot in the stud then pounding in a 20d spike in the upper part of the slot. As the wall shrinks the spike will keep the wall vertical but slide down the slot as the building shrinks. Since the sauna also has an interior shower I've had to make sure the water supply has room to move. Don't install water pipes without room for them to move! It you don't the building will shrink and push on the pipes. Not shown is the 1/2" sliding bolt that keep the lower wall trim with the gable wall. This is the same principal as the side walls. A bolt is secured to either the top or bottom plate, then allowed to pass through the other plate. The bolt keeps the walls together but allows them to settle evenly.

Block wall

SPRING 2008!
As soon as the weather warmed up we started. The first job inside was to build the cinder block wall around the wood stove. The blocks were laid 'dry' that is there is no mortar between the blocks. There is however re-bar and concrete in the columns inside the block. The copper water pipes for the stove's hot water tank and the shower also enter through the cavities in the block. Lots of measurements need to be taken here as there are certain safety distances that must be maintained from the firebox to combustible materials. Because the interior of the sauna is 9' x 11' each inch counts.

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All of this is needed because the wood stove is fed from the dressing room, not from within the sauna room itself. We've made saunas in the past where the wood stove is fed from inside the sauna room. It always makes a mess no matter how hard we try to keep it clean. So, this time we designed the sauna so that we can make the fire in the stove from the dressing room and keep all the wood away from the clean sauna floor and benches. All of that required a fireproof wall.

Framing the roof

Summer seems to end more quickly whenever you have a roof to build and this one was no exception. The race was on. The cold Autumn rains were winning.

The ceiling boards went up, we squared them and began working the rafters...and not the camera. This is the only picture of the entire roofing project I could find.

On top of the ceiling boards went the vapor barrier (6mil poly). The 2 x 6 rafters were next. I considered using 2 x 8s or10s and with that added space more insulation could be used, but...this is a sauna, not a home. Our wood stove will be used to create massive amounts of heat quickly for relatively short periods of time. We won't be living in this building where the heat would need to be conserved. So in the end I used 2 x 6s and 6" fiberglass insulation. I did lay a 6" strip of ridge vent mesh from eve to ridge on top of the insulation for venting, aluminum eve and ridge vents were also added. On top of all this went 1/2 plywood sheathing, a tar-paper product ( I can't remember the name of the stuff) and finally the shingles. Oh, and yes we framed in the chimney and installed the roof jack and the insulated chimney to the stove.\

(UPDATE: November 9, 2008 - We've learned that you should NOT put lots of big stones in the top of this stove. By big I mean the size of a grapefruit. Lots of stones (perhaps 10 gallons ,suck up tons of heat and render the stove inefficient. Once we removed the vast majority of these and only used about two gallons of stones the sauna heated up great. We are considering adding additional rigid insulation (2") on the interior of the ceiling of the steam room and then covering it with cedar to speed up the heating time. Right now it takes about an hour to get the steam room to 140* F.)

Now, the last step to prepare for the first winter was to make a temporary door and install the three windows. Using some left over 1/2" plywood and 2x4s the door was a snap. The windows also went quickly. The cold and snow were next, and the long wait for spring began.

I think I should mention here that all of this work was being done on weekends and by this time we were all getting tired. Using a calendar it became clear that at this rate it might be 2027 until the project was complete so we vowed to take two weeks vacation in the spring and get it done.

The Ceiling

The roof of our sauna is built backwards. That is we first installed the ceiling, then the vapor barrier, rafters, insulation, plywood and shingles. All from the outside!

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The important part here is to do both sides at the same time. This way you can keep the tendency of the ridge pole to warp to a minimum. If you do one side then the other, the ridge would slowly be pressed down and out towards the unfinished side ultimately leaving you with a noticeable bow. By working both side together you not only can keep this from happening but you can also check to make sure everything looks good on the inside. You don't want one side racing in front of the other so that joint lines don't match up from one side of the ceiling to the other. You can see in the middle picture I started in the center of the ridge and worked out towards both ends. This cuts in half any problems that may enter from boards drifting.

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Here you can see the porch end and see that we've trimmed off the tailings at the eves. All that means is that each 2 x 6 ceiling board wants to run longer or shorter than it neighbor. After all the boards are fastened we trim them all the same with a skill saw.

Thanks to everybody!

Thanks to good friends and family the end of last summer couldn't have been more special to us. Priscilla and I would like to thank each and every one of you who helped in so many ways. The building of this sauna is more to us than just saw dust and picnics. It has been about building a life.

We have a special book we like to call our 'dream-book'. In it, each weekend morning we lazy around and talk. I draw out plans on the pages of that book because sometimes I'm not so good at describing things and Priscilla is not so good at making sense out of my non-sense and drawings work just fine for both of us. That book helps us, because right now we only have weekends together; the dream book helps us to re-unite.

We talk and plan and dream on those mornings. Each of you are in our dreams and play a very big part in them. Even though some of you may not have been able to take part in the logoramathon you were there in our hearts.

Thank you one and all!

Bruce & Priscilla ( sometimes known as Brucilla )

Erecting the gables and ridge pole

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