From Sauna to Studio: Turning Trash to Beautiful Booth

by | Sep 3, 2025 | audio production, Voiceover, VoiceOver recording

The irony cracks me up.  My recording booth was too hot, so I bought a sauna to record in.  I’ll explain.  Recording VoiceOver in a top floor booth with no ventilation was getting unbearable.  I decided to move my workspace to the basement.  The contractor’s estimate to build me a booth was a bit high and frankly, his design didn’t impress me.  So I went on Facebook Marketplace.  A guy was selling a broken sauna so I went to look at it.  Sitting inside, it just felt right.  “THIS is where I want to record my voiceovers,” I said to myself.

Was it a crazy idea?  Yes.   Did the construction project go smoothly and quickly?  Um, not exactly.   Am I happy with the finished product?  Absolutely!

Image showing the "before" image of old broken sauna next to the "after" image of new recording booth constructed from the old sauna. It is now called the Sauna Studio.

Sauna Studio: Before and After

It looks beautiful inside and out.  I’ve had the sound quality tested, tweaked and approved by several audio engineers.

What did it take to convert that Marketplace seller’s trash into my VoiceOver treasure?

  1. A friend with a pickup truck and strong muscles to move it to my house
  2. Many trips to Home Depot, Lowes, and my local hardware store
  3. Hours watching YouTube videos to see how others built THEIR recording booths
  4. Discussions and check-ins with Randy Garbin, the person I hired to do the carpentry work
  5. Journaling and Meditating to keep myself grounded when dealing with weather and supply chain delays, and my own mistakes, like not ordering enough acoustic foam

I had a hunch that some people might find this conversion story interesting so I’m glad I took photos and videos along the way.  The image in this blog shows the dramatic difference between “before” and “after.”

And as a bonus, I got a lot of Sauna Studio content to post on social media.  It felt good to engage again with whoever’s out there in internet-land.  I liked having a topic that I could post about regularly, such as when I celebrated my VoiceOver company’s 20th anniversary with a series of videos about my two decades of recording VOs.  

You can see the progress on my YouTube channel.  Click the Sauna Studio playlist.  The first batch of videos are of the construction process itself.  I hope you enjoy the time-lapse video and my spontaneous happy dances as we made progress.

My next blog will go a bit more in depth into the construction project so stay tuned for that.