Erecting marquees over obstacles

In my past hiring life I erected marquees over swimming pools, sunken gardens, flowerbeds, ponds, rockeries, trees, statues, just about anything you can find in a garden we covered at one time or another. The result can be stunning but the method can be tricky.

Some things to consider if you’re incorporating parts of a garden inside a marquee:

Allow longer to put the marquee up
If a tree needs cutting to fit inside then offer to cut it while erecting the marquee – this ensures the minimum amount is cut off (an unnecessarily trimmed tree can lead to an unhappy customer, I know from experience!)
Pools and ponds need to be completely covered by one marquee with enough space to walk round
Hedges and walls can be partly incorporated but this often means cutting a wall panel to fit around them – keep any old side panels for this kind of work or contact us as we often have marked walls we can sell cheaply
Plan how the marquee is to be erected while on site, failing that take some photos and email us and we will advise how we would approach the problem.
People pay a fortune to hire in small trees and bushes in to marquees, incorporating existing plants inside can really add a feature (especially covered in fairy lights for example) so it’s often a good sales pitch.
Remember that anything incorporated in to a marquee will cut down on the available floor space so decrease the maximum capacity accordingly.

Typically the best way to erect a marquee over any obstacle is to only partially erect the marquee. Say you’re putting up a 6x12m marquee and there’s a small tree at one end I would erect most of the marquee (6x10m say) leaving the last bay over the tree off completely. The most important bit – I would have the roof up on the framework attached on as much as possible so when the last bay is fitted (tall steps required) the PVC roof can just be pulled along that last bay to fit.

What you want to avoid is trying to lift and fit the PVC roof on to a fully erected framework, it is a very tough and heavy operation.

Thanks for reading

Spencer