Custom & DIY Saunas
Built around your room,
not the other way round
A prefab cabin has to fit your space. A custom sauna is the other way round — the room comes first, and the cedar, benches, glass and heater are milled and specified to suit it. Under a stair, in a garage bay, along an awkward basement wall: if it can be framed, it can be a sauna.
Four rooms a prefab cabin will never fit
Custom works for new construction and renovations alike. It is almost always the answer when the space already exists and cannot move.
A basement or spare room
The framing, the floor and the drain are already there. A liner kit turns a stud wall into a sauna without adding a building to your yard, and without a permit for a new structure in most places.
A garage bay or pool house
Half a garage becomes a full six-person room. Concrete floor, an existing 240V run, and a wall you were never going to use for anything else.
An awkward footprint
Sloped ceilings, a chimney chase, a 5-by-8 leftover behind a stair. Custom lengths are cut to the room, so nothing is wasted working around an obstacle.
Replacing a tired old room
The shell is sound but the cedar is grey and the heater is thirty years old. Strip it back to the studs and re-line it — usually the cheapest way to a room that feels brand new.
Four steps from a tape measure to first steam
Measure the space
Interior width, depth and ceiling height, plus where the door goes and which wall carries the electrical. Write the numbers down before you order — the builder sizes the heater and the bench lumber from them, so they have to be the finished dimensions, not the ones the room has today.
Configure it yourself
Use the Sauna Builder to pick your cedar, bench layout, door, glass, heater, control and lighting and watch the total move as you go. It greys out parts that do not work together and will not let an incompatible pair into the cart. If you are unsure about a specific product, call us before you order.
We check the order before it ships
Before an order leaves we check it against what you told us: that the control matches the heater, that the kW suits the room volume you gave us, and that nothing obvious is missing. We are checking the parts list, not designing your room — the layout, the build and the permits stay yours.
Build it, with the guide open
The kit arrives by freight with instructions. Our Sauna Guides walk the whole job — framing, wiring runs, ventilation, vapor barrier, batten spacing, cladding, benches and heater guards — in the order you actually do them. All heater wiring goes to a licensed electrician.
The wood decides how the room feels
Clear vertical-grain cedar is the classic — warm, aromatic, and it never gets too hot to lean on. Thermally treated aspen runs paler and stays cooler to the touch. Blackened aspen turns the room into something else entirely.
Clear Cedar 1×6Vertical grain. Warm, aromatic, the classic.
Clear Cedar 2×4Grade A+ vertical grain. A chunkier bench.
Thermo-Aspen 2×6Heat-treated. Barely moves, stays cool to touch.
Aspen Midnight Black 2×5Blackened aspen. Dramatic against pale walls.
Where people sit sets everything else
Heat gathers at the ceiling, so the upper bench is where the sauna actually happens. Get its height right — roughly 41 in off the floor, with the lower bench near 24 in — and everything below it follows.
Sized to the room, not to a catalogue page
Harvia and HUUM both publish 1 kW per cubic metre — 1 kW per 35 cubic feet — and their own model tables stretch to about 47. Somewhere near 40 to 45 cubic feet per kW is the working figure, and every square foot of glass counts as roughly 4 cubic feet more. Undersize it and the room never gets there; oversize it and the heater cycles and dries the air out. The builder does this arithmetic for you, from the manufacturers' own model ranges, and will not let you pair a heater with a control it does not take. The Sauna Guides show the working.
The details people actually notice
Sauna doors always open outward and never lock. Glazing is tempered and dual-pane. Light belongs under the bench or behind a backrest, never overhead in your eyes.
Ten footprints to start from
Interior dimensions in feet. The price is the cedar interior package for that footprint — walls, ceiling, benches, backrest, heater guard, duckboard floor, vapor barrier and hardware, about 500 lb of thermally treated Western Red Cedar. Your door, heater, control and lighting are separate, and you pick those in the builder.
What arrives, and what you supply
In the cedar package
- Tongue-and-groove cedar boards for all four walls and the ceiling
- Two tiers of floating benches
- A backrest
- A heater guard
- Walking-area duckboard flooring
- Trim
- A vapor barrier roll
- Assembly and mounting hardware
You supply
- The framed shell — studs, subfloor, exterior finish
- Insulation between the studs
- Foil tape for the vapor barrier seams
- Finished flooring and any drainage
- A door, a heater, a control and lighting (all chosen in the builder)
- Electrical rough-in and a licensed electrician for the heater circuit
- Ventilation duct penetrations and vent covers
- Basic tools: level, drill, mitre saw, staple gun, clamps
Not sure which part you need?
Call or email us about any product on the site and we will tell you what it is compatible with and what it needs alongside it. We supply the materials. The design, the build, the permits and the wiring stay yours, with your own contractor and a licensed electrician.