Honest Instructions for Building a Sukkah

Welcome to the season of Sukkot, a time of family, community, and the realization that you have 3.5 days to build a hut on your lawn. So pull out the work gloves you haven’t used since last Sukkot and let’s get started!  

1. Buy the sukkah, thereby emptying your child’s college fund in the process.
2. Alternatively, if you already own a sukkah, curse yourself while removing all parts from the impossible-to-reach locations you left them in last year.
3. Take out instructions.
4. Just kidding, you’ve long since lost the instructions.
5. Sort out all the different pieces by type and size. Sigh in relief as you discover the project is not as large as it seems.
6. Realize you forgot to take out 50% of the parts.
7. Take out the remaining pieces. Generously reapply the duct tape that is keeping most of them intact.
8. Begin installation.
9. Realize that you installed the pieces backwards. Uninstall and fix the problem.
10. Discover that the pieces are somehow STILL backwards???
11. Allow your children to start helping.
12. Spend three hours fixing their “help.”
13. Finalize the frame of the sukkah. Discover that this took twice as long as you allotted for the entire project.
14. Begin hanging canvas walls, carefully avoiding the holes that have grown bigger and bigger each year.
15. Fail to avoid making the holes even bigger.
16. Take call from co-worker asking what you are up to. Quickly change the subject.
17. Wonder why someone hasn’t created a sukkah rental service.
18. For that matter, why hasn’t someone created a Pesach dishes rental service???
19. Complete walls.
20. Assure yourself the leftover pieces are just “extras.”
21. Begin hanging roof beams.
22. Hope that nobody you’ve invited over chag is actually familiar with the halachas for a valid sukkah.
23. Resentfully wonder why your neighbor can hang up fake cobwebs and giant skeletons, but YOU’RE the weird one.
24. Hang s’chach (roof material).
25. Remove the ten splinters you now have in your fingers.
26. Welcome in the bee colony that will be treating your sukkah as their new home.
27. Take out the moldy box of decorations.
28. Try to sort out years’ worth of decorations. Give up and hang melded hybrid decorations.
29. Set up an outdoor extension cord that theoretically goes for 50 feet but is hopelessly tangled into 10.
30. Hang up Christmas lights. Feel weird about it.
31. Set up Costco folding table. You know the one.
32. Set up chairs, none of which come from the same set.
33. Take a moment to stand back and admire your work.
34. Watch as a light gust of wind blows away half your work.
35. Rehang s’chach and decorations.
36. Eat inside because it’s raining.