I have a waterfront sauna cabin project that started late 2008 and only recently was signed as a contract. It took more than a year to sketch and plan a solution, which met customer’s requirements. Does it usually take this long to plan a log sauna cabin? No, it does not take this long. However, this project was especially time consuming because of three specific difficulties: a sloped terrain, a waterfront lot and a demanding customer. Here’s how they affected the outcome.
THE CUSTOMER
This is the most difficult one so let’s start with that. First of all, demanding customers are different from difficult customers. Difficult customer turns an easy task into a nightmare and you can’t please them no matter what you do. Difficult customers don’t listen any reasoning, instead they just resort to being unreasonable. Demanding customers ask only something that is remotely possible to do and they give very good reasons (usually money) for you to do it. With demanding people one has to do the very best and with the difficult people one has to be the toughest geezer on the block.
THE SLOPED TERRAIN
The simple way to design a log cottage on a sloped terrain is to use cellar or pillars and that way create a unified level for the log frame. This time we ended up mixing concrete slab, pillars and two different floor heights in a small lakeside sauna cabin. There are some interesting structures involved when you make ventilated ground floor in two non-settling levels while all the walls are log walls that settle. Did I mention that the building location is downward sloping solid rock?
THE WATERFRONT LOT
It partly stands over the water, which is normal, right… But that wasn’t the only problem that came with the waterfront lot. The owner had to build a separate road to the lot in order to obtain the right to build. Naturally there was a fair sized stream running through the property so building a road also meant building a bridge. All this lot trouble meant that the design process was frequently stopped, because it looked like the owner wouldn’t have the building permission. This happened in Sweden, but apparently there are even more things that can go wrong on the waterfront just check Ontario Waterfront Cottages to know what.
