Us four under two birtch trees

Us four under two birtch trees

Monday, 24 June 2019

Buying and taking down a Sauna

After the project of the brick laying we went to get a sauna. We would like to have an old building in our new yard and it would also be a nice atmosphere in an old log sauna. We have been looking on the internet for one for a few years now and have gone to see a few but never a suitable one. Now we went to see one about 40 km from our house and it seemed good. The sauna is 100 years old and the log part of the building is 3.5m by 3,5m with a post and beam structure in the rest. The lowest logs were rotten but we thought we could just replace them. Otherwise the building seemed really suitable for us. It has a sauna with a combined washing room and then a separate dressing room/summer room. So we bought it.



Our two German helpers Pirmin and Jackob, and Mick started by taking all the inside paneling boards off that were covering the logs. We tried to take all apart so neatly that we could use them again. After taking off all the boards we were able to see the logs were not at all in as good condition as we were hoping for. From outside they look good but from inside many were rotten, much more than just the lowest ones...


In the deal with the people selling the sauna we did not need to take anything we did not want so we left all the insulation, broken boards, the chimney, the rotten beams and other stuff.


The summer room was not built with logs so we were able to take it down easily. This is what was left after taking the summer room walls away.
After taking the roof off we were able to loosen the logs by hand using a nail bar and then lift the beams onto the ground. They are so old and dry they weigh very little. Now we also really saw the condition and were really disappointed by it. Almost half of them were rotten and so not usable or not worth putting in a building again. This meant to build a new sauna out of these we would need to replace half of them.
So we moaned and groaned and felt stupid and felt we have wasted all this time and energy and money for something that turned out to be something we did not want. In the end we took most of the logs to maybe use in something later (maybe not a sauna) and thankfully we got some of our money back.
This project took us a week all together and fortunately everything fitted in a van and trailer by taking full loads back with us every day we went to work on taking the sauna down.

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