My husband and I are pushing 50, and our kids are pre-teens. Living in a tent this winter was not part of our life plan. But, PANS and Lyme and Mold don’t really take life plans into account, so here we are.
Last spring, I started to feel like the trailer might be getting moldy, and started to look at other options. A few other mold avoider families were living in canvas wall tents; specifically the Davis tents. We’d just bought our own land so we had a stable space to set it up, and it was less expensive than buying another trailer (although still more pricey than we expected once we incorporated everything; I’ll get into the details later.)
It took the Davis factory 6 weeks to build the tent. By the time it shipped, we’d found and remediated the source of the mold (a hidden leak in the drain pipe of the bathroom sink, that wasn’t hitting the leak detector because we had so much stuff stored under the sink.) Also, by then we were into the warm summer, and leaving the windows open often, and the trailer was feeling better. So the tent sat in a box for months.
We spent the summer doing infrastructure work (well, septic, grading, power) on the property, with the goal of having a modular built by rainy season. Except, COVID happened. The modular factory closed down, and then went back to half-staffed shifts. Meanwhile, the construction industry inexplicably exploded. Long story short, our modular got delayed indefinitely, and we found ourselves facing another winter with no house. Sigh.
And then when winter hit, I started again to feel like we might have some mold in the trailer. This time, it came on suddenly when the weather turned cold, which seems more related to condensation, or else bedding. We’re troubleshooting and gathering data, but in the meantime, we set up the tent as ancillary living quarters.
I’m writing this post to share our Davis Tent setup, including how we set it up, how it’s working, and costs, so that anyone trying to find a non-trailer solution to mold avoidance can evaluate whether this might work for them, too.
This is by no means a tent that you move from campsite to campsite. This is something you set up once you’ve already traveled enough to know what good air feels like and you either buy or long-term lease land where you intend to set up permanently.
Furnishings
This tent is huge. It’s at least twice as big as the trailer. It almost feels like a house, and that’s how we furnished it. It has all of our daytime and nighttime living space, except for kitchen and bath.
My husband has been working from a corner of the kitchen table for almost a year and needed a real desk. So that was first priority. The main room also has a queen-sized bed for us parents, an armchair for me to write in, and a woodburning stove.
Main room
Each kids’ “room” has a twin bed, bedside table, desk, and desk chair, and floor lamp.
Kid’s room
Our clothes are stored in under-bed plastic boxes.
Almost all of this is from Ikea.
I finally got wise and insisted on using Exped Megamat air mattresses. I’m tired of mattresses going bad. I bought these at one of the biannual REI sales. I think they’re very comfortable. The rest of the family is getting used to them.
I tried sleeping on a metal bed frame and it didn’t work for me. I think it’s an EMF issue. Hard to say. Regardless, we bought cheap unfinished wood bedframes and those are working well. The Queen-sized Tarva squeezes two twin-sized Exped Megamats together as tightly if they were a single mattress. The kids have Neiden twin frames, which are slightly too big for the Exped mattresses, but work fine.
In the main room of the tent my husband installed a ceiling light. It’s nice to have a dimmable switch as we enter the tent. The cord is zip-tied to the EMT tent poles.
Under the awning outside, we have our laundry shed and a picnic table.
We spent 4-5K on furnishings and all new bedding. Most of this can be reused in a house once we have one built, or we can leave it in the tent for guests.
Our tent
The tent we got is the Davis Tent Platinum Glamping package, with some modifications. We got the following add-ons:
- the Autumn Gold Sunforger treatment. Since we live in California, we cannot have a tent shipped without fire retardant. It’s not really an option to have it shipped elsewhere and forwarded, because these tents are huge. I’d say the tent plus awning easily weighs over 300 pounds, and that’s just the fabric. I do think I initially reacted to the fire treatment but it’s starting to get better after a few weeks.
- an extra panel to place in the middle of the tent, so that we could block off the back into kids’ rooms. We used a curtain rod and curtains from Ikea to block off the middle of the room, which makes two kids’ private “rooms”. Each is about 8’x10′.
- an extra window for a total of 6. Each kids’ “room” has a window on both outside walls, to allow airflow. There are also two windows in the main room/mom and dad’s room, and two big doors; front and back.
- the clear plastic window inserts. These have been nice in winter so we can have the view but the wind is still blocked. We still end up closing them at night because they’re draftier than the canvas.
- the stove jack
We spent a little over $4k on the tent and accessories. We also needed to buy about 40 lengths of 1″ EMT from our local hardware store, which added around $400. My husband cut the EMT to size using a jigsaw with a metal blade.
Setup
One of the reasons we’d put off setting up this tent is that the land we bought doesn’t have many flat spots. We wanted property with a top of the hill building site, and we have that, but it means that most of the rest of the property is all hillside.
Over the summer, we’d poured the foundation for a garage, but delayed the actual construction because we didn’t want to build in rainy season. So we found ourselves with a big, level, empty concrete pad right next to our trailer. That certainly made setup easier. We could have made it work on a hillside, but leveling it would have been a lot harder.
Our tent foundation
I think most mold avoiders have these on gravel foundations. We were pretty heartbroken when winter came around and we still weren’t in a house. So we wanted to make this as house-like as possible. We wanted a real floor.
Here’s a detail photo that shows our foundation setup.
The tent is 16×24′, with an additional 7′ awning overhang off the front. The foundation spans the inside of the tent (not under the awning), so it is also 16×24.
The foundation sits on a grid of 52 concrete deck blocks. Each deck block sits on a square of foam insulation, both to protect the garage floor underneath, and to minimize moisture wicking up into the tent. Joists are built using 13 pressure-treated 2x6x16’s across, and 4 pressure-treated 2x6x12s on the sides. The subfloor is made of 12 pieces of 3/4″ structural plywood sheathing. The tent’s sod cloth goes in between the subfloor and the flooring. We used vinyl plank flooring so it would have zero chance of soaking up water. Note that Costco has frequent sales on the version of this flooring that comes with integrated padding, but it wasn’t on sale when we needed it, so we found this one on Black Friday special at Lowes.
We couldn’t just set this up on the concrete garage pad because when it rains, water flows across the pad and would have soaked up into the subfloor. That’s why it’s up on concrete blocks.
The entire setup can be moved elsewhere when we’re ready to build the garage. It will be a lot of work, and wouldn’t be something we’d do more than once or twice in a lifetime, but all of the materials can be reused.
We spent an additional $2k-ish on materials for the flooring and supports (not counting the garage foundation it sits on.) My husband built it all.
Heating and cooling
When you move into a tent in late November in the mountains, heating is an issue. It only gets to around freezing here at night, and rarely snows. But it does rain a fair amount. And if it’s 32 outside, it’s also 32 in the tent. So heating has been a challenge.
At night, we stay very comfortable with these mattress pad heaters and Ikea’s warmest down comforter. I don’t perceive any EMF issues with these heaters. After the fire goes out, we don’t have ambient heat at night. We usually wake up to 32-40 degrees in the tent.
During the day, we use a combination of a Camp Chef Alpine wood stove and a Big Buddy Propane Heater. We use a heat-powered fan with both to distribute the heat, as well as a tiny desktop fan to blow heat into the kids’ rooms.
I was worried about using a wood stove, since we have a terrible time with wildfire smoke. But we’ve been fine burning oak that we cut down from our property when we cleared the building site. Plus, it’s free, since my husband did the work of cutting and splitting the logs. So the wood stove tends to be our main heat source. It sits on a piece of Hardibacker that sits over foam squares to protect the floor.
I liked the Big Buddy at first and I still like it as a carefully-used interim heat source while we wait for the fire to get going. But it is an open flame and now that we have curtains separating the kids’ rooms, it makes me nervous. We still use it carefully since it’s kind of difficult to heat the kids’ rooms otherwise. I don’t know that I’d use it with younger kids. I can smell the propane but don’t feel like I react to it.
Starting around late morning, the greenhouse effect heats up the tent pretty comfortably and we don’t need any other heat. In the afternoon we get a fire going and keep it stoked until we go to bed.
Summer in the tent might be tough. It stays 90+ degrees here for months, and smoke levels tend to be high during fire season. We can leave tent doors and windows open and use fans to create a cross breeze, but that might not be enough to help with the heat, and smoke will still be a problem. We’ll see when we get that far. We might end up having to move back into the trailer during the summer so we can close up and use AC. The mold problem might disappear by then, too, if it’s condensation caused by cold weather.
Kitchen and Bathroom
For now, we are still using the kitchen and bathroom in the trailer. I will likely cook outside in the summer, and there is more than enough space to set up an outdoor kitchen under the tent’s awning. Ikea had some cute mini-kitchen and utility sink setups like this one that would work well, fed by a hose and possibly an instant propane hot water heater.
We are waiting on an ERMI test of the trailer and will do some experimenting to find out if only the mattress and bedding seem moldy or if it’s the whole trailer, and it might just magically get better as soon as hot weather returns. So we’re not sure what we’ll do in the future.
Davis Tent offers cook tents and bathroom tents so if we didn’t have the trailer for kitchen and bathroom, we might use those. Cooking outside is no big deal but the idea of showering in a tent all winter is daunting. I supposed we could pre-heat it using a Buddy Heater. We already use a Nature’s Head composting toilet so that would be easy to move.
Pros and cons
Let’s be honest, none of us are thrilled to be living in a tent. But if we’re going to be, this is a pretty nice one.
This tent is safe, in a way that no other living environment has ever been. There is almost no way it can develop mold. (Knock wood.) There is no running water in it, and all exposed surfaces are either permeable cotton or impenetrable vinyl. Since we have it set up in clean air, it feels safe and good. I sleep so well in the tent now that we have it all set up and it’s had a few weeks to air out.
At the same time, it feels like a cabin. High ceilings, real furniture, square walls, a floor that doesn’t bounce every time someone walks across the room, a cozy woodburning stove. It’s really nice.
The big con is that it’s hard to keep comfortable from a temperature standpoint. We manage it, but it takes some work.
It’s been tough getting everyone on board with moving into the tent. I moved as soon as I could because I wasn’t sleeping well in the trailer, but I’m the most sensitive and also the most flexible. One son moved out not long thereafter and loves it. He has a lot more space and privacy than he did in the trailer. My husband reluctantly moved out a few days ago and has been having trouble sleeping because of the cold ambient air and the air mattress. He’s sticking with it, though. My second son, the one who has PANS the worst, demanded that I ERMI the trailer before he will agree to move and has zero intention of setting foot inside the tent until we get the ERMI results back. So, we wait.
We found out the first time it rained that the windows leak. Water soaks into the black trim around the window and puddles at the bottom, and then wicks inside through the black tie. It turns out that Davis actually discusses this issue on their website, but I only saw that after the fact. Water ended up on the vinyl flooring and the plastic tent sod cloth and was very easy to wipe up.
Since then, we sprayed all the black trim with Scotchguard and covered the most exposed windows with tarps, and it seems to be preventing further leaks for now. We’ll watch it carefully and adjust as needed.
When we first set up the tent, we realized that Davis had put the stove vent in one place in the tent ceiling, and a different place in the awning. I contacted them and they had a replacement awning out to us in a few weeks. They have consistently been easy and responsive to deal with.
Overall, we’re pleased with this tent. It gave us much-needed, safe ancillary living space for the winter. We spent around 10K on it, including all furnishings, not including a kitchen or bathroom. It was definitely more expensive than I realized it would be. But it should last until we get a house built. Hopefully that will happen sooner rather than later.
Postscript
One of my sons and I slept in the tent for more than two years. It turned out to be much-needed extra space once my kids became teens and outgrew the trailer bunkhouse, and it took much longer to get a house built than we planned.
Once we started to build the garage, we needed to move the tent. My husband built stilts into the hillside to hold it.
The tent stayed comfortable in the winter with a wood fired stove and mattress pad heaters, even when it snowed. It was harder to deal with once the summer heat really set in. We ended up having to cram ourselves into the trailer once the temps consistently hit 90s and above.
We’ve had the tent for more than 3 years now and it has held up great so far, even in extreme winter wind and rain and hot summer sun conditions.
Here are a few more photos of the tent in its hillside home.
