Sauna - Place for Relaxing

Here in Finland sauna is something that nearly everyone has and visits regularly. It has been estimated that we have approximately 1.5 million saunas. That might not sound much but when that number is matched to the people living in Finland, which is 5.1 million, we get about 1 sauna for every 5 people. Nowadays saunas are included even in the smallish city apartments. Sauna is part of our culture that most people living elsewhere might have difficulties understanding - same way as we have difficulties understanding how foreign people can live without having one :).

Saunas can be of different sizes, starting from just few square meters to tens of square meters. Same way as size changes, the outlook can vary quite a bit too. Traditionally saunas have usually been pretty simplistic. Wall material has usually been wood and there hasn't been any special lightning solutions or other design gimmicks. You can probably get the picture from the picture below:

Traditional Finnish sauna

Nowadays there are, however, more and more different kind of designs that try to make saunas even more inviting and stylish places to spend quality time. Saunas can for example have a bit different color scheme:

Picture from sisustusblogi.fi

Lightning solutions have also advanced quite a bit. Indirect lightning is very popular and there are also more advanced solutions such as the illuminated glass wall in the picture below. Glass doors and glass walls are also popular as they are easy way to bring more space into the sauna.

Sauna design from Lumilaude.fi

Illuminated water bucket from Lumilaude.fi

Wall materials and stoves have also evolved. One can add for example little bit of rock into the walls to make things more interesting. Stoves, especially the electric models, come nowadays in many interesting designs. I'm myself fan of the design shown below.

Regardless of the design, sauna should always be warm and welcoming. It is, after all, the place where you relax and have good time. Hot sauna is a great place to visit after work, after jogging or maybe just on the Saturday evening as most Finns do. And regardless of what some crazy people think sauna won't get you killed in normal conditions :).

-K- 

Candles

This time of a year it starts to be dark outside and the weather gets colder, at leat in Finlad. Candles are a good way to bring some light and warmth to autumn.

Pictures from 1 2 3 4

-N-

Fire no longer main cause of damage

2009 was the first year in Finnish insurance statistics when the main cause for home damage was no longer fire. Now over 70 million euros worth of damage was caused by water leaks from home appliances. This is a result of both rising number of homes having both a washing machine and a dishwasher and availability of low quality appliances.

Cheapest wine cabinet in Finland?

As Verkkokauppa.com tries to expand from selling just computer equipment, they are offering some items on new categories at low prices. A fine example is a wine cabinet for 90 euros. Of course, it comes from a Chinese factory just next to the one producing motherboards, but so does what others are selling.

Item page

Visiting Finnish mobile home expo

Finnish mobile home expo, Caravan 2010, was held last weekend in city of Lahti. I did short tour there and took some photos. Here are some of them:
As above pics show, some of the mobile homes seemed actually pretty comfortable. Small spot lights seemed to be almost everywhere, though some had managed to put other lightning too.
As always with mobile homes, the living space was very limited. There isn't much room between bedroom, kitchen and the living room. The biggest problem seemed to be width of the mobile home. Narrow corridors felt usually pretty unpleasant, though there were also ones that felt quite "big enough".

Storage place was often found above head. Every closet had door so that things wouldn't fall out from there while moving. Most doors had also some opening mechanism that made sure they wouldn't open by accident.

Common solution for saving the little space was to have the tiniest possible bathroom. Some didn't even have any real space reserved for toilet, rather it was just placed in to the corridor like in the above picture :).

In the end many of the mobile homes at the Finnish expo felt just a bit dull and cheap (though it wasn't cheap if you checked the price tags..). Some had managed to pull out some interesting designs into the interiors but almost all looked the same plastic white from outside. I believe that more exciting solutions can be found from US market and also from people who actually build their own mobile homes (some people buy old buses and build them up for living).