Inside our new sukkah. (Click to enlarge.)
A quick primer: Two weeks after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, comes the festival of Sukkos (the Biblical festival of Tabernacles; some pronounce it “Sukkot” – Wikipedia link). It’s a week-long holiday on which observant Jews eat, sleep, and generally spend time in sukkahs (Wikipedia link), little huts with roofs made of plant material. Our cousin Robert Avrech recently posted a collection of photos of sukkahs new and old, from different parts of the world.
About ten years ago, our family spent its first Sukkos at home. That meant either buying a prefab sukkah or building one from scratch. The problem was that we had nowhere to put it when it wasn’t being used. Our garage is small, and we don’t own a shed. Many prefab models, and most DIY sukkahs, are made of between seven and nine framed panels, each measuring four feet wide, seven or eight feet tall, and from one to over three inches thick! There are other options, generally consisting of fabric stretched over wood or metal frames; they take up very little space after they’re disassembled, but (a) many of them have walls which sway in the wind, which may or may not be “up to code” for a sukkah, and (b) I’d like to avoid using metal, since there’s more than one rabbinic authority who requires that the roof not be supported, even indirectly, with metal. (It turns out that this last consideration may be more complicated than that, but I only recently found that out.) There was also the question of how much we could afford to spend.
I ended up designing a sukkah with a notched wooden frame and walls made of white Sequentia (fiberglass-reinforced plastic). Everything was held together with vinyl cable ties. It was a really nice sukkah to look at and sit in, the materials were fairly rainproof, it was very compact when disassembled, and (on paper, at least) it looked to be pretty sturdy. But it was only stable once it was completely assembled, so it was a dog to put up and take down – the first time we erected it, it took no less than six people to hold the parts in place while I ran around, fastening the pieces together!
Last year that sukkah blew down in a storm. It had withstood much worse, but I guess some of the wood had weakened with age and exposure. I’d been daydreaming about a redesign for a while, and now opportunity was knocking.
The new sukkah is made of decking lumber, corrugated plastic boards, and expanded PVC. (See list of materials below.) I could have used HDPE, the material plastic cutting boards are made of, but it’s twice as heavy and twice the price. The biggest improvements over “Sukkah 1.0” are that the corner posts are free-standing and self-supporting, and the panels are stiff enough that they don’t flop over before I have a chance to secure them in place. Not counting the time it takes to drag all of the pieces out of the garage, around the house, and onto the front yard, I think I could have this sukkah completely assembled in less than fifteen minutes!
One downside of the new sukkah is that the corner posts aren’t made of plant-based material. I didn’t have time to both fabricate them from plywood and weatherproof them.
Here’s a photo of two corner posts, cut from expanded PVC board. One is disassembled and the other is complete and standing. Each completed corner post weighs about 32 pounds. Designing these was the hardest part of the project. My oldest child reminds me that, at one point, I had to put aside my pencil and the Legos and take a nap!
(Click to enlarge.)
It would have taken me forever to cut these out with a jigsaw, but Hive13, a local hackerspace, let me bring down the materials to be cut on their CNC router (explanation here). They were also nice enough to show the kids and me around. What a cool place. (Thanks, Coy!)
Each of the sukkah’s sides has crossbeams and a track, which run through holes in the corner posts. Notches in these cross-members allow them to drop onto (or fit under) the corner posts; the notches also keep the cross-members from sliding out, and they make it easy to space the corner posts correctly. Two crossbeams run along the inside of each wall, and one runs on the outside. In the picture below, the tracks and inner crossbeams are in place.
(Click to enlarge)
The crossbeams are made of 6″ wood decking planks (pressure-treated), ripped in half lengthwise. The tracks are made of composite decking planks, also ripped lengthwise; the planks come pre-grooved on their undersides, which saves me the trouble of having to cut grooves myself.
After the panels and the outer crossbeams are up, here’s what the sukkah looks like:
(Click to enlarge)
Note the cable ties in the panels, and the ends of the roof supports sticking out. More on those later.
The side of the sukkah with the entrance has only one plastic panel. There’s a curtain hung across the doorway, which we can tie up to one side if we want fresh air. I cut holes into a piece of wood to accommodate the crossbeams:
(Click to enlarge.)
The top beam passes through, while the lower two are notched. (The holes are offset to accommodate this.) I could have used expanded PVC for this part, too, but I didn’t have any more. The lower crossbeam is made of a reclaimed piece of our old sukkah, and it has lots of holes drilled through it; I repurposed one hole to attach a piece of yarn, with which to tie back the curtain over the entrance.
(Click to enlarge.)
There are four notched beams (wood decking planks, again ripped lengthwise) running across the top of the sukkah. Well, near the top – they rest on top of the crossbeams, with their ends sticking out through holes in the panels, about a foot below the tops of the panels. These hold up the roof, which is a bamboo mat. (I think the protection of the panels prevents the wind from lifting up the bamboo mat and blowing it away, but I can’t say I’ve tested that theory. I do put some scrap wood on top of the corners of the mat, as ballast.) Here’s a view from inside the sukkah, before the mat was rolled out, in which you can see both the beams and the curtain:
(Click to enlarge.)
The beams themselves are spaced with more pieces of wood decking, ripped and notched.
After we put the sukkah together, we realized that the holes in the corner posts are also useful for routing electrical cords.
(Click to enlarge.)
The lower crossbeam facing the house (there are no plastic panels on that side, since the house provides a brick wall) was also doubly useful – we kept unused folding chairs in the space between the beam and the house.
We reused our old system for weather-proofing the electrical connections and a timer for the overhead lights, an inverted plastic container hung from a crossbeam.
(Click to enlarge.)
At some point we noticed that the panels, which are a bit flexible, were sagging and/or flapping in the wind. We ended up drilling holes in them and lashing them to the crossbeams at three points (the upper corners and center bottom) with cable ties. If at we ever have to replace any panels, I may splurge and get quarter-inch expanded PVC, which I believe is stiffer.
After the holiday, it was a cinch to take the sukkah down, and the pieces fit into the storage space we’d set aside for our old sukkah, near the ceiling in the garage – with room to spare for the boxes of lights and decorations!
(Click to enlarge.)
Those are the old Sequentia panels you see, still hanging on the garage wall. It’s amazing how little space they took up!
Acknowledgements
- G-d, of course. (I wouldn’t be building a sukkah if I weren’t religious, would I?)
- My wife, who tried very hard (and very well, mostly) to act as if she were completely confidant that I’d be able to get the sukkah up before the start of the holiday.
- The good people at Hive13, Coy especially.
- My kids, who helped a lot with construction and decoration.
- The sales rep at Curbell Plastics, who first suggested using expanded PVC instead of HDPE.
Materials
- Expanded PVC – 4′ x 8′, 3/4″ thick, two sheets. (75 pounds apiece!) Purchased from Piedmont Plastics, where both the sales rep and the in-stock inventory were excellent.
- Corrugated plastic – 4′ x 8′, 1/4″ thick, six sheets. Also purchased from Piedmont Plastics.
- Wood and composite decking, in 8′, 12′, and 16′ lengths. Purchased from the local big-box hardware store. Note that the beams and tracks must be longer than the sides, so they’ll extend through/past the corner posts. For example, the beams for the 12′, three-panel sides had to be cut from 16′ stock. (Also note that decking lumber longer than 16′ may be impossible to find, which will make it hard to expand the sukkah beyond 12′ in any direction. I do have a plan, in my mind, for making mid-wall supports similar to the corner posts, which would support end-to-end assemblies of crossbeams and panels.)
- Vinyl cable ties, 11″. Purchased from the local big-box hardware store.
- Lined curtain, 4′ panel with loops for large curtain rod. Purchased many years ago from a long-forgotten discount store.
Tools, etc.
- Table saw, with thin-kerf blade and dado
- Jig saw (handheld)
- Drill and bits (1/4″ and 3/8″)
- CNC router (3/16″ bit, IIRC)
- I drew a rough pattern for the corner braces in pencil on graph paper. Then I laid it out in Adobe InDesign and Illustrator and exported the file as DXF (AutoCAD), which was imported into whatever CNC router software Coy was using.
