How to …build a sauna

The last time I entered Bruce’s sauna, the chimney collapsed, sending three naked fellows fleeing outside for cover. At the time I recall asking myself, as a shy and retiring Englishman, what I was doing (in my birthday suit) on the wrong side of the Arctic Circle, with two complete strangers, alternately steaming my skin to a crisp inside in a home-made sauna then freezing my proverbials off in the lake outside?

Four years later then, on our return to Bruce and Anna’s wonderful forest hideout near Rovaniemi, it seemed appropriate and indeed sensible, to perhaps try and construct a new sauna.

The Finns are fanatical about their saunas. It is more than a way of life: it runs right to the very core of their being. Every house has a sauna, every hotel offers a sauna, indeed even our hostel in Helsinki included a sauna in the price.

Soon after entering this extreme heat-mad country I began scanning for saunas in the corner of every building I entered and imagining the new opportunities they could provide. Libraries which might like to provide students with a nice hot break from their studies or supermarkets could offer tired shoppers a nice quick relieving sweat in between buying the weekly groceries…

But why should the Finns have all the fun? Saunas can be built anywhere, from Tromso to Truro. Just follow these instructions and you'll soon be on the way to a good steam and soak:

1. Find a site, preferably a nice, peaceful heavily-forested location next to a lake (the colder, the better).
2. Buy a sauna with log cabin to place it in. This being Scandinavia, you can easily find a ready-built kit. You just need a chum with a tractor to cart the lot to your site.
3. Get some more mates round to heave the heavy pine timbers into position.
4. Sit back and admire work, deciding you‘ll get the builders round to finish the job.

Add in endless swarms of massive, ill-mannered, blood-sucking mosquitoes, pour in lashings of warm lager and mix with an unusually hot day. Add in a liberal dash of an open attitude to group nudity and garnish with a Makkaraputki (‘sausage pipe’).

Serve it all up, before the ice on the lake starts to melt, at a birthday party for fellow scientists and climatologists (‘Antarctica’s nice this time of the year…’)