We ordered our tent from Wall Tent Shop in October. We looked at several brands, but Wall Tent Shop stood out for the features, competitive pricing, free shipping, and the fact that they have no sales tax. We also liked that the company is a small business and Veteran owned. The shipping was pretty fast — we got our tent within the week. We ordered their Wilderness Wall Tent, with fire, water, and mildew treatment. We elected to get windows on the sides and back. We ordered the vinyl floor and extended fly as well.
For us, setting up our tent was an all day project. The tent didn’t come with any setup instructions, but we had watched enough videos and read enough articles to have a basic idea of what we were doing. Special thanks to Dalton Off Grid for their help! They have videos detailing their wall tent journey, and they were kind enough to answer several of my questions! We began by laying the vinyl flooring out on the deck.
Next, we laid out the tent on top of the flooring. It was very heavy and took all of us to get it situated.
Next, we cut our guy ropes and burned their ends, so that they wouldn’t unravel.
Next, we began by tying loops into our guy ropes, then tying the tent up to the hitching rails. We starting by tying to the bottom rail, but we ended up moving our tent later to the top rail, as it fit our tent better.
Next, we threaded our ridge pole through the tent. Some of us got inside for this part.
After we got the pole through, it was time to stand it up. This took the whole family, with members inside and outside the tent.
We did not think to mark where on the ridge pole the posts were supposed to go. In hindsight, it would have made things easier. We had to adjust the pole once it was up, and that was very difficult. It involved everyone lifting the weight of the tent off of the pole with 2x4s, and our brother Jeremiah hammering it into place with a 2×4 — not an ideal situation.
After we got the posts standing, we made sure the posts were centered and level, and we attached them to the deck with structural screws.
Once we got our posts up, our tent was technically up! We secured the sod cloth to our deck with 2x4s. We will take these off when we put up our interior frame.
Next, we attached the fly. We followed the advice and example of other wall tent owners. We tied a long rope to the fly and hoisted it over the ridge pole. We were glad we had the whole family for this part of the project, as it took lots of hoisting and pulling to get the fly over the tent.
We finished attaching the fly just as it was getting dark. It was a beautiful evening, so I snapped a pic from the tent front porch.
We got the tent secured for the night with plans to come back the next morning and start on the interior frame. We also knew we had some adjusting to do, as our tent and fly chimney holes were not quite lining up.
HOMESTEAD SISSIES 