Embracing the cold

IT WAS A JANUARY EVENING, THE KIDS WERE ASLEEP and my wife's eyes were fixed on her novel.

"If you had your choice, what would you pick: a new bathroom or an authentic Finnish sauna?" I asked her.

Two decades earlier, I had spent a summer studying abroad in Finland, where the surname Niskanen fills three pages in the Helsinki phone book. I spent several months swimming in the Baltic Sea and researching Finnish saunas.

I sweated in hand-hewn log saunas built in the 1880s. I beat my back with leafy birch branches in trendy urban saunas. I even bathed at the prestigious Finnish Sauna Society in an authentic "smoke" sauna, where a trace of wood smoke and steam are allowed to commingle.

I became a connoisseur of "löyly," that uniquely Finnish word for the steam that rises from hot sauna stones.

My wife, a Midwest transplant from North Carolina, had never enjoyed Minnesota's deep, cold winter days. She had always listened with keen interest to my stories of Finnish sauna lore and tradition. She had been in health club saunas, but not in a true Finnish sauna, and the thought of a steamy, cedar-lined room appealed to her.

"I think I'd like the sauna," she said, "especially if it had a wood stove and we had a nice dressing room."

Our decision was made.

AUTHENTIC DESIGN

You can buy kits for pre-fabricated saunas, either for inside your home or outdoors, but I had acquired a few power tools and basic carpentry skills while remodeling our house. I wanted to build my own.

For design ideas, I consulted the photos of historic and modern saunas I had taken in Finland. I settled on a simple one: a 10-footby- 16-foot building erected on concrete pilings and posts, with a green metal roof, lots of windows and board-and-batten siding.

I needed the pilings because the sauna would be built on an incline overlooking a lake behind our home in Stillwater. I chose the green metal roof and rough batten siding for the Scandinavian look I had seen in Finland. We decided to stain the siding to blend with the reddish-brown hues of the surrounding pines.

The sauna itself would occupy half the building; the other half would be the dressing room. Since I wanted it to be a multi-purpose building, I incorporated a sleeping loft above the sauna room; the kids could host sleepovers there in summer.

My budget was $4,000, less than the $6,000 to $9,000 you would pay for pre-fabricated saunas.

To stay under budget — and green — I decided to use recycled lumber, windows and doors bought mainly from recycle centers around the Twin Cities. For new lumber and the custom-sized metal roof, I went to Menards.

My two biggest single expenses were my Finnish-made, woodburning stove ($700) and the white cedar tongue-and-groove paneling ($750) for the inside of the sauna.

I bought the stove from Finn Sisu, the Nordic skiing and sauna store in Lauderdale. For the paneling, I went to John Latola, who owns a custom sawmill in the Finnish-American community of Palo, Minn., on the Iron Range.

Latola knew exactly what I needed when I called.White cedar, a Minnesota native, is difficult to find as a milled paneling product, and Latola produces only small batches of it, mostly for custom saunas.The pale tan wood is aromatic, beautiful and rot-resistant.

A few weeks later, I made the 500-mile round-trip drive to Latola Lumber for a load of white cedar paneling. It turned out to be my most important purchase for replicating the Finnish sauna experience.

“The kitchen has always been the hub of the house,” Karen says. “Everyone always wants to be there.”

SIMPLE PLEASURES Working on weekends and after work, it took me more than two years to build our backyard cabin with the sauna inside. It was a labor of love, and the beginning of what has become a full-blown love affair with the small, handsome building in our back yard, situated among red pine and outfitted with a woodstove and a smartlooking dressing room.

An old Finnish saying states, "You must conduct yourself in the sauna as one would in church." For us, that means quiet conversation, no cell phones (which risk melting anyhow), meditating on the crackling fire and enjoying the simple pleasure of steam mingling with cedar.

Our 6-year-old daughter loves to hear folk tales in the sauna's candlelight. Our 14-year-old invites her girlfriends over for a sauna, giggling and inevitable boy talk.

After a sauna, we frequently sit in chairs under the trees and listen for owls hooting and coyotes yipping; on the coldest nights, we enjoy the yawning and groaning of the lake making ice. Unfortunately, our lake is too shallow and weedy for an icy plunge, but a roll in the snow will do.

One evening, when the temperatures dipped to 20 below, we emerged from the sauna with our skin steaming and stood defiantly against the cold.

On nights like that, it's easy to entice friends from town out to the country by telling them the sauna will be heated to a toasty 120 degrees. For kids, we bring two buckets of cool water into the steamy room and let them splash around.