Day I-don’t-know-what of the sauna rebuild and thing are looking up.
The Man spend a day putting up the studs, air vents and insulation. On the next day I continued from where he left off and prepped the smaller studs where the panels will be nailed to. We are recycling everything we can from the old sauna so I’ve spend a few good hours pulling nails off the old studs. Wood is expensive these days!
We finally got to start putting back the panels. The back wall has the same panels it used to, with replacements for the ones with air vents that are in different location now, so the colour is fairly uniform. On the other walls there is some changes and we didn’t spend time trying to colour match each panel to the next, hence the quite colourful side walls. It’s fine, the sauna is dark when in use and I will probably try and stain the walls anyways at some point.
Paneling is fairly easy but as ours are old and re-used, some where split and others quite wonky, making it more time consuming. It’s also really annoying making the holes for the beams and air vents. We also ran into an annoying problem with the nail gun, wondering why the fuck some nails didn’t go fully in, until we realised we are working on the brick wall and the nails are a few millimetres too long. It was 8.30pm and the Man had to hurry to the store to get shorter nails. He made it!
There is still all sorts of things that need to be done, like finishing the lower part of the wall before putting the last panels in, trims, wiring the light and new tiles on the edges where I had to rip the old ones off. We also won’t have a door for the sauna in a long time, towels hanging from a beam will have to work for now, but the most important thing is that we can actually use the sauna again!!
I wasted no time and immediately fired the stove so it could start heating while I did a fast cleanup. It takes quite a while, a little over an hour to heat up the sauna now that it doesn’t have a door and there is cold air coming in throught the brick wall on the shower side. We have plenty of firewood though as we haven’t used any in a couple months.
The Official Sauna Inspector has arrived on the premises and gave us the go-ahead to start using the sauna again!
