>> event planning articles > Marquee heating tips

Marquees on sand

There are times when you’ll be asked to put marquees up on all sorts of different surfaces, one of which is sand. There are a couple of things to be aware of:

Anchoring the marquee down. If the marquee is going up on a sand school then the ground will probably be solid enough under the layer of sand to take marquee stakes as if it were on grass. If it’s on a beech then the soft sand will go deeper so you need longer stakes, more of them or heavy weights.

Dance floors. If you put a dance floor down on sand or even on top of carpet with sand outside eventually the sand will work its way on to the dance floor. From experience I know that’s a bad thing. We didn’t even consider the implications of doing a large wedding marquee on a sand school until we went to pick the marquee up afterwards – the sand had been walked in to the marquee and on to the dance floor. Throw in 150 people strutting their stuff and the effect was like sandpaper scratching our lovely parquet dance floor all night! An expensive lesson learnt.

If you are offering a dance floor in a marquee near sand then use one that can be re-stained (wooden dance floor) or incorporate in to the price re-lacquering the top surface.

Thanks for reading.

Spencer.