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Your Home Sauna – Choosing the Best Location
Indoor and outdoor saunas are now available in a variety of shapes and sizes. They can be built to accommodate just about any style or specification. In fact, today’s sauna buyers have so many options, sometimes the most difficult decision can be where to locate the sauna.
For an indoor sauna, the most popular locations seem to be the bathroom and basement. Owners of bathroom saunas often make use of the existing plumbing, drainage and privacy a bathroom typically provides. Given that sauna baths are revered by countless enthusiasts for their cleansing and rejuvenating qualities, it makes perfect sense that so many people choose to install their saunas within just a few steps of their showers and bathtubs.
When a restrictive design or other extenuating circumstances prevent a residential sauna from being installed in the bathroom, many homeowners immediately look to their basements. The addition of a basement sauna can often lead to a person’s cellar becoming the most utilized room in his or her house. A space that was perhaps once reserved for storage can quickly be transformed into a choice spot for enjoyable social gatherings and favored leisure activities. Indeed, just as regular sauna use can promote healthy living, a basement sauna can give a formerly blasé basement new life.
Outdoor saunas are most commonly installed in homeowners’ backyards. The ideal arrangement occurs when a new backyard sauna complements an existing outdoor swimming pool. Weather permitting, the presence of the pool encourages adherence to the much-prescribed heating-cooling cycle advised by health professionals and practiced by responsible sauna bathers. With both a swimming pool and backyard sauna on your property, you may find yourself playing host to your friends and neighbors more frequently than you ever did before. The combination of an outdoor sauna and pool may simply be too enticing and pleasurable for them to resist.
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The Tradition of an Outdoor Sauna
The sauna was a part of our lives from our first memories as a child. It was an outdoor sauna that was located about 30 yards behind the house and about 10 yards from the lake we lived on. It was constructed of Northern white cedar and measured 12 feet by 10 feet in size. It featured a traditional sauna stove that was made in Bruce Crossing Michigan a little town in Upper Peninsula. Our outdoor sauna also had a cold water spicket that was used to fill the water bucket for making steam, cool downs and for rinsing the sweat off before you headed back to the house.
The floor of our outdoor sauna was also cedar and was raised about a foot off the ground. Underneath was a pit filled with stones that would allow the water to drain into the soil. We were lucky that we did not have the clay soil that some of our neighbors had which would require a special drain to remove excess water.
The main reason for having a separate outdoor sauna was due to tradition but more importantly to reduce the fire hazard. More than one of our friend’s sauna has burned down during the past 40 years. It is interesting that we all used wood to heat our homes but aside from a chimney fire or two none of our friends or neighbors homes burned down. Some people have linked the over use of alcoholic beverages, another sauna tradition, to the high number of sauna fires. Many times an outdoor sauna stove is allowed to get very hot in preparation for the sauna and that is something that we seldom allowed with home woodstove.