DIY saunas are not all glory and pride. If you have little to know carpentry skills, then you'll need a professional.

Call it what you will: a Swedish bath, a Finnish sauna or a sweathouse. Either way, it means one thing: relaxation. Perhaps nothing is more relaxing than a therapeutic heat treatment and having your own home sauna. While there are DIY saunas, doing so can be quite difficult.

Before taking on the task of building your own sauna, there are a few things about DIY steam rooms to consider first.

Swedish bath

When thinking about DIY saunas, take the following into account:

  • Your skills . If you don't have a lot of carpentry experience under your belt, a major project like the construction of a home sauna is probably not something that you want to take on. If you have only basic carpentry skills, you should consider hiring a contractor to build your sauna or, at the very least, buying a prefabricated sauna or sauna kit.
  • Your time . You need more than just a weekend to build a DIY home sauna from the ground up. If you are looking to build the sauna faster or if you don't have at least three or four weekends to spend on the project, you might need to hire the task out to a professional.
  • Your space and location. You can build your sauna in a spare room or build onto your home to add a room for your sauna. While you can build your sauna as big or small as you like, you need to have adequate space for framing and installing walls, flooring and seating, as well as space to hide equipment.
  • Building codes for your location . Be sure that you know the ordinances in your area that regulate the addition of a sauna to the home. Professional installers know the codes for your location, but a DIY homeowner may need to do some lengthy research to keep everything above board.

Finnish sauna

If you decide to go for a sauna kit and a DIY installation, then you will need to pick the kit that best suits your needs. Sauna kits usually include blueprint plans for the sauna as well as the heater and hardware needed to install it. Other plans may be plans only, and you will have to purchase the equipment separately.

Related resources:

  • Indoor saunas: an overview of options
  • Add a bathroom to your home
  • Outdoor saunas: an overview of options
  • Saunas for the home: indoor or outdoor

Most sauna builders and installers will have a number of different sauna plans for you to choose from. You simply pick out the ones that are in your price range and will fit in your allotted space, and the builder will do all of the work to install your sauna. This is obviously the simplest way, but also the most expensive.

Still, when you factor in the possibility of potentially building the sauna incorrectly or wasting materials during a DIY project, it sometimes pays to just hire someone to do it for you in the first place.

When it comes to saunas, DIY is definitely an option. Nonetheless, if you are not confident in your do-it-yourself skills, you can use QualitySmith to find a top-rated sauna installer in your area.