What Was I Thinking?

Did I mention that my husband is a biomedical engineer? “Handy” doesn’t begin to describe him. All this time I’ve been thinking we’d get a sukkah kit, maybe from The Sukkah Project, which lets you order the kit but get most of the materials locally to save on shipping. One look at the pricing and Eric said, “Oh, they must be making a fortune. I can do this a lot cheaper.”

Our friends Dov and Leslie (she’s the one who talked me into this, I might add) made a wood sukkah a couple of years ago and now the wood is warped, so Eric wants to use PVC, which is pretty expensive if you buy it as a kit. But if you design it yourself and have the materials delivered by Lowes?  A fraction of the price!

He’d design the whole thing tonight, except I remind him that we don’t know all the rules. What are the rules, anyway? You have to be able to see through the roof. Don’t you have to build it on a specific day and take it down on another specific day? Will he need to take a day off of work to do this? How much can we do ahead of time?

His eyes gleam. Now I've done it. I've given him a project.

So the type of sukkah he has in mind now might look a little like this one from The Sukkah Project:

Kind of your basic Tinker Toys design.

To figure out the rules of design, I looked up an article I remember reading in the New Jersey Jewish News last Sukkot and I came across a contest held last year called Sukkah City NYC 2010. Check these out!

Wow! Alas, Eric is much more of a practical engineer than an artist. And if it were up to me, the whole thing would probably collapse when the wind blew, so it’s definitely up to him.

As for the rules, Sukkah City has this to say: "The basic contraints seem simple: the structure must be temporary, have at least two and a half walls, be big enough to contain a table, and have a roof made of shade-providing organic materials through which one can see the stars.Yet a deep dialogue of historical texts intricately refines and interprets these constraints--arguing, for example, for a 27x27x38-inch minimum volume; for a maximum height of 30 feet ... even, in one famous instance, whether it is kosher to adaptively reuse a recently deceased elepahnt as a wall. (It is.)"

Ew.