Bennington II Deluxe Low Loft Tent Bed

Comments about Bennington II Deluxe Low Loft Tent Bed:

My wife and I love supporting Vermont and thought we would be buying a bed made in the USA, specifically Vermont. Unfortunately it wasn't until we received the boxes that we saw "Made In China" printed all over. A bit disappointing but somewhat expected in this day and age.

Assembly was difficult, again somewhat expected with such a piece of furniture. However the assembly instructions were clearly printed in China too and it was full of the quintessential language barrier translations that made it more difficult to assemble than necessary. Common sense and intuition should prevail though.

The biggest and most concerning issue I have is how toxic some of the materials are. Specifically the rubber ladder and slide hooks (4 in total), vinyl used for windows and the tent fabric itself (and I suspect the adhesive on the velcro as well). It's very disappointing that a Vermont company would allow such toxic materials to be used in their product, especially in furniture that undoubtedly will be used in a child's bedroom. As soon as I opened the plastic bag containing the aforementioned rubber hooks, the smell was overwhelming. Unbearable even. But since they are required for the child to get in and out of the bed, we had to continue assembling the furniture with the toxic pieces in place. I didn't permanently attach the hooks to the side rails knowing I'd eventually replace them with metal hooks. The following morning (our child's bedroom door remains shut, with a space heater and humidifier on conditioning the room) the smell that filled the room was absolutely shocking. The amount of off gasing that occurred was staggering. The main culprits being the rubber hooks. So disappointing. So sickening. It wasn't until another 2 days that I was able to get to a hardware store to replace the rubber hooks with metal ones. Fortunately it's a common size and angle. Prior to installing the metal hooks, I literally had to clean the side rails (where the rubber rested) because the toxicity remained.

To this day, the vinyl in the windows and the tent fabric itself are still off gasing.... this is approximately 4 weeks now. The smell isn't nearly as shocking as what was emitted during the rubber hooks' tenure, but it is still incredibly disappointing to know this is child specific furniture.

When the weather permits we will have to hang the fabric outside for a few days to see if that finally let's it off gas entirely. I made no mention of the adhesive that backs one side of the velcro used to fasten the fabric to the frame because it's merely speculation. But one thing to note about the adhesive is that it is ineffective in securing the velcro to the wood frame. From day 1 it kept peeling off the frame, thus having the canopy and walls, etc collapse entirely. Again common sense and intuition prevailed: I merely set a few small wood screws through the velcro strip to hold it in place. It works fine. Then again, for a bed that costs over $1000, you'd expect the manufacturer to have dialed it in for you.

Overall: our child loves the function and "funness" of the bed. It seems like the frame is pretty durable, but the toxicity of some of the materials used, when taking the price into consideration, knocks this down to a 2 out of 5 for us.