Wedgwood R&D: Sukkah building, phase I

We decided to celebrate our wonderful home and especially our wonderful backyard by doing something we've never done before: building a sukkah for Sukkot. For those of you not in the know, Sukkot is a fun harvest-themed holiday that comes shortly after the rather serious, introspective (and indoor) High Holidays. You build a simple shelter in your yard and hang out in it as much as you like for one week, ideally picnicking in it at mealtimes and bringing guests. It's very casual. The shelter has to have some kind of walls, but it doesn't have a solid roof; instead, just natural materials like pine boughs or whatever's handy. It should be shady inside, but you should be able to see the stars through the roof. It's supposed to recall the huts that harvest workers threw together so that they could sleep out in the fields, the minimal shelters used by the Israelites during their forty years in the desert, and on a symbolic level, the fragility of all human dwellings. To me a sukkah seems like it would have all the magic of a Christmas tree combined with the thrill of a blanket fort, but even better because it's outside and you eat food in it. What could be better than that? (Note: One is officially excused from the obligation to eat in the sukkah if it's raining, an important rule for Seattle. Even the quantity of rain is specified: if the precipitation is such that it drips in your soup, you may go in.)

There is the matter of actually building this thing. Jewish law invites you to throw together whatever kind of structure you want, as long as you build it yourself and it has that insubstantial roof. My web research turned up various misadventures of city Jews who tried to design their own. At the other end of the spectrum, you can buy a prefab sukkah with faux wood-grain vinyl panel walls for something like $800, which is not our style. We opted instead for a sukkah kit from the Sukkah Project, which sends you the hardware (brackets and screws), a green polypropylene mesh screen for the walls, a lumber shopping list, and supposedly klutz-proof instructions. The testimonials promise that it takes only a couple hours to put together the first time, and half an hour to take apart; the next year, it's much quicker to assemble because you leave many of the brackets on.

While the kids were off with Grandma, we went lumber shopping. First, though, we had to have a way to carry the lumber, because some of the required 2x4s are twelve feet long. (The sukkah will be 8x12 feet.) That meant a trip to REI for a rack for the Camry, which we had sort of been looking for an excuse to buy anyway... there's a canoe in the family, after all. It seems possible to me that building the sukkah will be more straightforward than assembling the car rack. We did manage it, though, and then took ourselves to Dunn Lumber for the boards.

The Sukkah Project instructions do seem very friendly and accessible. However, there were still decisions to make at the lumberyard. SPF lumber, white wood, spruce, cedar? It appears that the first three of those are roughly equivalent choices, all economical and reasonable for our purpose. Then there's the whole straight-boards thing, which a carpentryless girl like me just didn't realize was an issue. We needed seven 2x2s, and spent a while laying them on the floor to find ones that were less warped or twisted. The salesperson helping us was friendly and pleasant, and it's not his fault that 2x4s don't come in 93" lengths on the west coast; you can cut a 96" board to size if it has to be just right, or would 92-5/8" be good enough? Yeesh. We frowned at the design sketches in our instruction book and decided that yes, if they're all 92-5/8", it just means our sukkah will be half an inch less tall, and that's fine. We drove across the street from the store to the main yard, where someone loaded our very long boards onto the car for us. We tied them on with rope we had brought and drove home gingerly. No incidents.