Premium Custom Saunas Built in Dunwoody

What I've Learned Building Saunas in Dunwoody

Dunwoody is ranch-and-basement country. The 60s and 70s subdivisions — Dunwoody Club Forest, Redfield, Georgetown — are full of brick ranches on crawlspaces with a lower level that was finished somewhere along the way. That's where most of my Dunwoody builds go. The finished basement next to the laundry room or the old rec room is almost always the right spot for a 6x8 traditional sauna. Slab or framed floor underneath, the mechanicals already nearby, and nobody loses a bedroom upstairs. The teardowns along Mount Vernon and the infill builds around the Village have full basements and 200-amp panels, which makes them the easy jobs.

The Dunwoody wrinkle is the age of the electrical. A lot of these homes still have the original panel — 100 or 150 amps, full of tandem breakers, and no open slots for a 40 or 50-amp heater circuit. I won't guess from the listing photos. Send me a picture of the panel and I'll tell you whether we need a subpanel or a full service upgrade before we talk about heater size. A subpanel job is a few hundred dollars. A sauna built without the electrical sorted first is a sauna that trips the breaker every session.

What surprises Dunwoody homeowners is the crawlspace moisture. These are older homes, and half the basements I walk into have that damp Georgia smell before we ever build anything. A sauna adds heat and steam to a space that's already fighting humidity, so the ventilation gets sized accordingly. Mechanical exhaust on a timer, twenty to thirty minutes of post-session airflow, every time. I'd rather oversize the fan than come back for a repair call. The fan is cheap. Re-paneling is not.

I build throughout Dunwoody, including Dunwoody Club, Georgetown, Redfield, the Village, North Shallowford, and the 30338 and 30346 zip codes. Basement retrofit, new construction, or a home that needs the panel sorted first — the consultation is free. Tell me about your space and I'll tell you exactly what fits.