An era comes to an end!  The Sukkah, previously standing outside our building (which mind you withstood numerous wind and rain storms), is officially down and put away.  We have done our best to salvage as much of the wood from the Sukkah as possible so that we can reuse the wood (and screws) next year.  Afterall, Sukkot is about connecting with nature and we are doing our best to conserve materials so that we have the most limited impact on our environment.

1 Sukkah built, 1 Sukkah taken down, and most importantly…0 major injuries (splinters do not count).

We are putting on our last finishing touches and then we are done!  What an amazing experience with this group.  Here our last group is putting up some corner supports to help strengthen the joints of our Sukkah.  Come on by the check it out and look at what an amazing job our students have done creating a safe socially-distanced Sukkah (it is designed to allow numerous people to be inside the Sukkah while maintaining social distancing).

What an amazing crew and such spectacular progress.  We have but minutes of work left on the Sukkah (which is now entirely free standing without any supports); ahead of schedule and well under budget.  We completed putting up nearly all of our plywood siding today (still have 1 more sheet left).  All that is left is a bit left on the roof and some decorations and we are done; ready in time to celebrate for Sukkot!

We got all the hard stuff done!  Now it is time to lift 30 pound boards of plywood up to 10 feet in the air to attach to our Sukkah.  No problem for our 7th graders….easy as can be!  We are making great progress putting up our siding and am sure we will finish in no time!

Best part…no injuries (aside from a blister or two) so far.  Knock on wood!

It is wonderful being back, starting the new year fresh!  We had our extended classes today and were able to make a lot of progress.  We got our corners bolted together (almost finished the second corner; we need a new bolt) and were able to get some roof supports up.

Tomorrow, we will work on getting some of our plywood up on the walls and continuing to support our still fragile walls.  Hopefully (fingers crossed), we can take all our support beams off later this week and NOBODY gets hurt (and the walls stay standing).

Great work crew!

We got the walls up!  Now we have to get them secured together (so we can take our support beams out).  The walls are not perfect so there is a bit of work that needs to be done.  We are busy working on the little stuff now.  We are measuring out the top plate so we can put our 2x4x16 studs across our 8×12 walls (so as to add as another support), as well as drilling into both corner posts so we can put our carriage bolts in place; thus increasing the strength.

Couple more weeks and we will be done…hopefully!

We moved all of our walls into their final position and actually put them up!  What a productive day…must be the sunshine.  We managed to get all walls in place and temporarily secured them…until tomorrow.

final nails hammered in

everyone working together to finish our walls

this is what happens to a hammer when you hit with such force!

with such strength, it only takes 3 to move a wall

it took the entire class to move our biggest wall

putting our support beams up

our big lift in progress

wall number 3 getting lifted

drilling in our support beams

our current 3 wall set-up….not bad for a day’s work