The building of a sauna

After finishing the framework I could start with the weather boards. I started with the ceiling. After the first few boards, I needed to install the first LED lights. This was a bit of calculating to spread them nicely around the sauna, but I worked nicely.
Once the ceiling was in we celebrated with a nice beer, also to see at what height the benches should be placed later on, so I could place reinforcement in the walls. By x-mas eve all but the back wall where covered.
On xmas day I started with the salt wall. As these salt stones are manually cut there is a bit of variety in their size, so I started with sorting them to size. Then I started with a frame. Then I created the location for a ventilation hole in the wall and covered the wall.
When I was ready for the wall behind the heater, I found out the stones where forgotten when we picked up the order. Luckily after a phone fall they could be picked up on the 27th, so time for Mo and me to make a wall.
With the wall done, I could finally start with the salt wall.
To place it the high bench needed to but done, so that was next and while the salt wall was drying I could replace the bend in the chimney pipe that for some reason was a size smaller then the rest of the pipe and is it needed to be.
The placing of the salt wall did not go as easy as hoped, but the result was great! Next step the heater!

Getting ready for the holidays

During the week I had a lot of contact with the sauna specialist. Basically chasing them to make sure I would get the materials in time. In the end they could not guarantee the delivery, so I made a plan B. I asked Mo brother Mati to help out. He has a very big trailer that would easily fit all the materials. We agreed to pick up the materials on Friday.

On Saturday I started with the tile baseboards to finish the floor. On Sunday I used aluminum tape tape to cover all the seams between the insulation plate and cover the screw holes. After this I could start adding a wood frame to the wall and ceiling that will hold the weatherboards. A nice start of the holiday season!

Mati in action

Sauna measurements and ceiling

With the holidays coming up, there is a lot of extra time to spend on the house, so I figured this would be a good time to build the sauna, as I have 9 days in a row of mostly uninterrupted building time, plus it would of course be nice to have the sauna ready for the cold season.

So I measured the sauna and and started calculating the materials I need. It became a pretty long list, which I send to the sauna specialist in town. For some reason it does not seem like the ware very eager to sell a sauna as after the first day their website gave an error when the payment failed and since they really have trouble getting back to me.

In the mean time I worked on the ceiling of the bedroom.

During the weekend there was a big spurt in productivity. On Saturday Mo and Mattias helped clean up the old floor that was still laying in the garden and on Sunday Mattias helped replacing the outside door from the utility room and after sunset I finished the ceiling in the bedroom and the wall in the northern bay window.

Bedroom ceiling and wiring

With the knowledge of how many wires I need to run to address the LED strips on the beams, I prepared the wiring. When that was done I could put in the rest of the ceiling. With the shorter pieces It was easier to work with, yet still a lot of work, but with a great result!


WLED and a better bed

For the bedroom I have planned LED strips on the beams for some nice indirect light. To know for sure how to wire them and therefore how many wires I have to put in behind the wood paneling, I had to make a test setup.

The good news was that just a few weeks ago an very cool open source project was covered by Dr Zzs which looked very promising, so I finally took some time to create a test setup. I did not have the NodeMCU micro controllers they used in the example, but I did have the ESP-01 controller I used for the relay test a few weeks ago, which is also based on the ESP8266 chip, so I tried flashing that with the WLED software. It took some convincing but then I was able to connect to the ESP-01 and give it an IP in the network. Unfortunately there was something off with the wiring so it did not survive a power cycle, but the prove of concept was done and I was able to control the LED strip. Unfortunately also no pictures this time.

After the test, Jeff helped me to get the other good bed from the storage at Mo’s mother, as we decided it was time to sleep on a decent bed.

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