We are currently living off grid on a bare piece of land that we will soon build a home on. We’re living in a RV for the time being and don’t have a large amount of water (especially hot water) on site, so one of the first things we wanted to do was build a hot tub!

We entertained doing a cowboy hot tub our of a rubbermaid or galvanized trough, but in the end, we thought it might look a little tacky and to our surprise, it wouldn’t have been all that much cheaper than building our own cedar tub. We decided to have fun with it and build a cedar tub that we would love and enjoy for years to come.

In this series, we want to share with you how we’re putting the tub together. Check it out…

Episode 1: Finding Clear Cedar Boards for Pennies…

In this video we go through some of our tips and hacks for finding high-­quality cedar at very low prices, even from wood that at first glance appears to be low-quality.

Episode 2: Cutting the Staves…

In this video, we’ll share with you how to cut the staves of the wood hot tub, or the sides. You’ll need to do your own calculations to come up with how many staves you need which will vary depending on the diameter of your tub and the size of staves that you use.

Specifically, we’ll be sharing how we’re able to maximize each cedar board to utilize as much clear lumber as we can. We had to get a little creative with cutting our boards down but in the end, we had as little waste as possible and even had a lot of cedar leftover to construct accessories such as benches, stairs, and booze holders (priorities, people!).

Episode 3: The Stave Joinery…

In this video, we’ll share with you the solution we came up with for our stave joinery. When we first started searching the web for solutions, we didn’t come up with much that seemed feasible without spending A LOT of money! We finally decided to create the joinery on a router with bead and cove bits.

Episode 4: Building the Floor…

In this video, we’d like to share with you the building of the floor for our wood fired hot tub. In looking at most cedar tubs on the market, it seems that the floors are constructed out of 2×6 clear cedar. While we could find that if we wanted to, it would be at a high cost, so we decided to build out of materials that were extremely affordable and available to us.

Constructing the floor is fairly straightforward, but we hope to share a few tips and tricks with you in this video. In the end, you’ll need to do your own math and discover your own dimensions as tub and materials sizes may vary.

Episode 5: Assembly…

After we took our time planning and crafting the components of our wood fired hot tub, it was time to put it together! It’s one thing to plan the project but another thing to see it come to life. It was so awesome to see our finished barrel, even if it didn’t have water.

In this video, we’ll share some tips to getting the tub together. It’s pretty straightforward, but there are some secrets to making it work. Enjoy!

Episode 6: Benches and Plumbing…

After we had the framework of our hot tub completed, it was time to put on the finishing touches before adding water which included benches and plumbing. Both were fairly straightforward and had no surprises to them.

Episode 7: Filling the Tub…

The moment you’ve all been waiting for – filling the hot tub! We looked forward to this moment for months and we thought that filling the tub would wrap up our project, but it only revealed more problems! In the end, we were able to win the battle of the leaky tub, and also we ended up with a better water solution involving our hillside and two cisterns. This project took longer (much longer) than expected, but in the end, we were just stoked that our cedar tub was holding water!! Especially since we are hot tub building rookies!

Episode 8: Installing the Submersible Wood Stove…

The very last thing to do before our tub was ready to go was installing the wood stove. This step actually took a very long time for us mostly because we didn’t want to spend $700-900 for a specifically-designed wood stove for a hot tub. While we would have spent this if we had no other options, we looked into the option of building a stove ourselves and having a local welder put it together for us, or even coming up with some sort of “cowboy” wood stove involving metal garbage bins or kegs. In the end, we were able to find a used wood stove for a hot tub via a local neighbor. We picked this up for $250. Installing the tub took a very short time and we had the hot tub fired up within minutes of having the stove installed!

Episode 9: The Finished Hot Tub & First Soak…

WOW… the episode you’ve all been waiting for! You have NO IDEA how rewarding this soak was. It’s one thing to have a dream about all of the things you can do on your off grid property, but it’s another thing to put in the labor to make them come to life, and push through the hard times an setbacks. We hope you can all celebrate this moment with us and use it as inspiration to take on a dream project of your own…

 

If you like this idea, be sure to share it with your friends and inspire someone you know. Anything becomes possible with just a little inspiration…