How We Built a DIY Wood-Fired Hot Tub from Cedar Part 1

We are a young couple that left our previous lives behind to build an off grid homestead deep in the Idaho mountains. In ten months we have accomplished so much, from building an off grid cabin, starting a garden, and making our own lumber.

But one big project we haven't started yet is building our house. In a strange twist of priorities, we built a wood-fired hot tub first

In this video we begin the process of accumulating materials for our cedar hot tub. After a bit of time with a galvanized steel tub (the cowboy hot tub route), we realized it wasn’t going to work for us and that cedar would be a much better option in both form and function. The only problem? Cedar wood can be incredibly expensive. But we didn’t let that stop us! 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. Having ‘knots’ in a board of wood dramatically lowers the value and makes that piece of wood pretty unusable for most projects, especially for projects where the goal is to hold hundreds of gallons of water. The good news is that we founds ways that lots of lower­ grade lumber could still be usable for us, even with a few knots. Watch this video to learn our tips for where to find this high­-quality wood for incredibly cheap, and how to utilize it for a cedar hot tub.