We recently finished our first chuppah commission, a beautiful, full-framed canopy from clear fir, pictured below in the Temple Emanuel (the client’s) sanctuary.

To stay within the Temple’s budget, I used finished lumber from a local lumber yard I hadn’t used before, and working with it, I learned a valuable lesson: there is no such thing as “finished” lumber.

After all of the jointing/planing and sanding, I quickly realized that lumber becomes “finished” when it is no longer lumber, but a part of the final product.  While the quality of the lumber, a fir varietal that wasn’t specified, was fairly good in general, it still need quite a bit of sanding on the faces, and planing on some of the edges.

This project also had the added challenge of the small available space on the bima (the raised platform from which the services and weddings are led) was incredibly narrow for the size of the frames, and required the design of custom support systems to allow ease of assembly within the tightly controlled space.