I started this travel blog a few years back when I wasn’t traveling at all. I wanted to cultivate the feeling of being on vacation. During the early or mid years of the pandemic – hard to say – I clicked some buttons on my computer which resulted a few months later in a cedar barrel sauna kit landing in my driveway on a pallet.
What I didn’t realize was that I would soon have a nice toasty portal to this vacation-y feeling, right in my backyard.
I had experienced an outdoor barrel sauna for the first time at a favorite hotel on the Washington coast. It was love at first sweat. (Sorry.) I had been obsessed ever since, returning to the hotel for more, trying various inferior options like indoor infrared saunas, and also dreaming with a pal of starting a sauna business on Vashon Island. A sort of coin-op self-service book-online private sanctuary where folks could rent out a lovely enclosed space in nature with sauna and lounge area.
This plan didn’t work. We perhaps could have spent more time looking into things like permitting, legalities and funding than into the design and color of the Turkish towels we’d offer. But where’s the fun in that? So at some point the idea fizzled – but not until after I had bought the thing.
So I became the proud owner of a 680 lb pallet of boards that claimed to be a sauna kit and the only choice seemed to be plan B, which was to put it together in my little back yard.
Some boring details come next, in case you’re planning on trying this at home. I had to install 220v power for the electric sauna heater. This involved electricians, digging of ditches and a very very silly amount of money for electrical work, especially if, like me, you RENT your house!
The instructions said the kit could be built easily with two people and this seems correct, as long as one of them knows their way around basic tools including using a drill with confidence and has I’d say an average amount of muscles. We did it with three. At one point a whole person’s body weight was needed to keep the thing from tumbling down like dominos. I’m not an engineer, but it is round – and this shape behaves a bit differently than others.
We put the whole thing together in the better part of a day and then waited several weeks or months – it’s all a blur – for the electrical work to be complete. And then it was sauna time!
Fast forward a year and there’s an outdoor shower, some lights, a few plants to create a bit more privacy and this hot portal to that vacation feeling has been a literal shelter from all kinds of storms.
Woot!