Sauna: Landscaping

With the electrical rough-in for the sauna inspection approved, we could move onto the next phase of building our sauna: landscaping. The thing needed a foundation. After another not-insignificant amount of work, we're at last ready to build the thing...

Backing up a bit, to April this year, we stayed with friends in a house outside of Lander, CA for a week during Spring break. The gal who owned the place had done a nice job with the design, and K loved the large pavers she had that made up the back deck.

K had a plan. Fast-forward a few months when we got sauna fever this summer after seeing the one we ended up purchasing go on sale at Costco. We immediately knew where we'd put it and the foundation we'd build for it. Big, offset pavers.

As a reminder, this is how that corner looked last month:

We had our work cut out for us even at that point, which was after we had already cut down a 40' tall corkscrew willow, leveled the lower tier and dug out all the grass. First step: With the electrical signed off we could fill in the trench and complete the small retaining wall. We had also already replaced that ugly, beetle-infested willow with a much smaller Japanese maple along with a yucca (inspired by that house in the Sonoran desert).

To build the wall, we picked up a bunch of pavers, toppers, landscaping caulk (to hold everything together), and a diamond-blade for our trusty, 30-some-year-old-now yardsale circular saw. Then got to work.

To cut the end bricks, I'd take two passes with the circ saw, the first about half the blade's depth and the second the full blade depth, hosing down the brick with water before each pass. Depending on the cut, I'd at least do this on the top and bottom of the brick. Even at full blade depth, those opposing cuts didn't quite cut the brick clean, but it was an easy final step to use a cold chisel and break it along what was left.

With the retaining wall complete, we could backfill it and start to level the much larger area where we'd be pouring the concrete pavers and on which the sauna is going to be built. This is maybe K's happy place, digging in the dirt.

While she did that, I took wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full of dirt and hauled it, 5-gallon bucket by 5-gallon bucket, up our hill. This, we both joke, is why we don't bother with gym memberships.

Once enough soil had been removed and we were down to the compact subsoil, we started leveling the entire area. On our hands and knees. I actually enjoy the meticulousness of this part of the job, and I've been largely responsible for leveling every area K has dug out around our property, heh.

It felt good getting to this point, even though we had a significant job ahead of us: pouring a shitton of concrete. Before doing that, I had to measure, cut, and build all of the 2x forms. That took a solid day, interrupted by a quick day trip to Seattle for a night before K's birthday dinner out and Tinlicker concert at Showbox Sodo while her parents had the kiddos. It was an awesome show.

After our now traditional post-midnight stop at the Dick's near her parents house, we grabbed the kids and hit the road for home. Despite loving her parents and being grateful for all of their support, she wanted to wake up on her birthday in our home. We pulled in just shy of 4am, then we were up the next day finishing the forms so we could pour some concrete. Happy birthday, love!

There were two tricky parts about our form construction worth noting:

1. After some back and forth with ChatGPT, I opted to build them as one ginormous form rather than individual boxes, which meant I had to figure out how to put it together so we could remove all the pieces once the concrete had set
2. Like we did with our deck extension at this same time last year, we picked up the offset 5º angle of our primary bedroom in the form design, which meant I had to figure out the angles and measurements for the sections of those two form columns (columns, as if looking down on them from above)

Heres a view of that, sort of. The right angle made by the string lines I had laid out with a 2x4 in place along the 5º offset.

The 2x square in the distance is the "fake" sauna I built to its dimensions that we've been using to figure out where to place the electrical stub-out and how to design the forms so they'd be under the sauna's two 4x4 footings. It's come in very handy, I'm not gonna lie.

For the box construction, I used my trusty 90º corner clamps and checked each one was square.

Obviously, there were coffees involved.

For the column section breaks, I simply wedged two perpendicular 2x4s into place on either side of a pair of stakes. The poured concrete would push against each free-floating 2x4, but since they weren't attached to anything when I'd pull the larger "column" form, those section pieces would just pop out. Spoiler: it worked perfectly.

I had to break out my trusty grinder to cut some 3/8" rebar to place in the forms that would be supporting the sauna. Good times with power tools!

With the forms built and leveled and the rebar in place, K compacted the 5/8 minus gravel we had poured as a paver base. It was finally time to pour some crete.

Thankfully, a friend from work had a concrete mixer he offered us. I'm not gonna lie: despite it being incredibly awkward to load with two 80-lb bags per mix, it saved us an unimaginable amount of time over the alternative of mixing individual bags by hand in a wheelbarrow. In the end, we ended up mixing about sixty bags of concrete.

For this project, we ordered two pallets (80 bags total) of Sakrete High Strength mix, then picked up a smattering of necessary tools:

• 16" magnesium float (to push down the aggregate and pull up the creme)
• 3/8" edger
• 24" broom

Despite having poured our back yard pizza oven countertop back in 2020, K and I do not consider ourselves concrete experts by any standard. This was very much a learning process, adjusting our process and technique form-by-form. The result: not bad. Not only did we likely save ourselves $8-10k, the forms looked progressively better as we worked our way from the ones under the sauna to the ones by the deck (read: that we'd actually see).

By the last forms we poured in the dark, we had gotten the hang of it and I was actually enjoying the process of taking the mag float and working the creme to the surface, then edging and applying the light broom finish.

One detail worth pointing out: I popped a piece of scrap 1-1/2" ABS pipe from our plumbing bin around the 3/4" Schedule 40 PVC to protect the conduit from the expansion and potential shifting-over-time of the concrete. That way the however many hundreds of pounds of concrete in that paver isn't pushing directly on the conduit.

The final, final step was to order 3 yards of pea gravel to fill the paver gaps and refresh all the other gravel areas we have throughout our yard. The kids had fun jumping into the enormous, dusty pile.

And K had fun finishing this project. It was her idea, after all, heh.

If we do another concrete project, we'll continue to work on perfecting our technique, including adding some bit of Portland cement to each mix to get a smoother, creamier finish typical of professional pours. All that said, standing back and looking at them we can't help but feel an incredible sense of accomplishment and revel in how transformed this space has become. And it doesn't even have a sauna sitting on it. Yet.

Now, we get to keep the pavers under wraps for another 3-4 days (which will be a week, total) to keep the surface hydrated. Then we'll let them cure another couple weeks. Then... we finally... get to... build... our sauna!