The plan below for the frame shouldn't cost more than $40 (when I used this plan a few years ago it came out to under $30). If you build and store it right (out of the weather, with screws and bolts), buying the wood is a good investment. You can use scrap wood and bring the monetary and ecological price way down. My favorite sukkah was in Seattle, made entirely of scrap, and it even had a window installed. The main thing is the mitzvah! And nothing is sweeter than sitting in a sukkah.

S'khakh: The most important thing for a sukkah is of course the roof made of s'khakh, which is not only the essence of the sukkah, but also the reason why it's called "sukkah". S'khakh can be made of anything that grows from the ground. and has NOT been manufactured into something new (i.e. not a woven grass mat). It should cover the roof by connecting two adjacent walls and reaching to part of one of the opposite walls (you can use less by not extending the s'khakh all the way to the fourth wall, which just makes the sukkah smaller).

The s'khakh should cover more than half the roof (creating more shade than light), but with openings throughout, and none of the holes in it should be bigger than a handbreadth. If you don't have enough s'khakh and some of the holes are bigger than a handbreadth, that just means you should sit uinder the places that are thicker when you use the sukkah.

S'khakh can't be held together by wire, and even though most Sukkah dealers hold by the lenient opinion that allows them to sell rolls of bamboo slats held together by fishing line, many people (including myself) are of the opinion that that too is NOT kosher. Lastly, the s'khakh should not be tied down in anyway (imagine something like the roof of Findhorn for those who have watched "My Dinner With Andre"), and it should ideally rest on plain wood, not metal. The safest way to make it super-kosher is to support all the s'khakh on freely resting slats, such as the 1x1's suggested in the plan above.

Walls: Without walls (2 plus a handbreadth it's not a sukkah. Two full walls should make a corner (i.e., be adjacent and more or less perpendicular), and the third handbreadth should come off the corner from the other vertical edge of one of those walls. The cheapest way to create sufficient walls is to use sheets or tablecloths (beautiful prints add a lot, too). Given how late Sukkot falls this year, people in more northern climates might want to add walls more solid than that – any plywood sheet will do, and something that comes up only half-way, or across only halfway, will still help keep the chill out. You might need to add another 2 x 4 upright in the middle of a wall to have something to attach a smaller plywood piece to. And if you really want to make it on the cheap and don't need a lot of space, you can save by going from an 8' by 12' plan to an 8' by 8' or a 4' by 8' plan.

The rule for the height of the walls is that they should be close enough to the ground that a goat wouldn't crawl in (three handbreadths), and even closer to the roof (about a handbreadth). The rule about the roof is more lenient if the s'khakh noticeably overhangs past the wall. The s'khakh sits on top of the 1x1's in the plan above, which should be unattached but resting on top of the walls.