all around best cheap tent?

Get a good survival blanket (The kind that look like a tarp on one side and silver on the other, not the cheap ones that look like syran wrap) and use it to cover the floor of your tent.
They reflect like 90-95% of your body heat so they make a good ground cover (alot of people don't realise it's even more important to insulate yourself from the ground than it is from the open air) but they don't breath so don't put it on top of you or you'll wake up soaked in your own sweat.
They only weigh like 1/2 lb, fold up to the size of a paper back book and cost anywhere from $10-$15.

 

that sounds like a great idea. how big are they? my tent sleeps 3, but my kids have a cheap little coleman 2-person dome.

about seam sealer - my kids and i have serious chemical allergies to chemicals in the toluene/formaldehyde group. salesman guy says these chemicals are in the seam sealer. just airing out the tent might do for most people, but we can be made miserable by fumes most people wouldn't even detect. on the other hand, i don't want my kids getting chilled in a leaky tent during a rain. what do you think, to seal, or not to seal?

 

The survival blanket I have is like 6ft. by 6 ft. and I think that's about standard.

The better tents have a rain fly that covers the whole tent almost to the ground. This seems to work well. I've spent alot of rainy nights in this kind of tent and did just fine.
I live in a tent most of the year so I've had quite a few. I've never used seam sealer and I've never seen any need but then again I almost always get my tents from flea markets, thrift stores or garage sales so I wouldn't know if they'd ever been sealed.

 

my tent has a rain fly that covers to the ground. the kids' tents have a rain fly, but it doesn't go so far. still, it's a *much* better tent than the little coleman pup tent we got at ames when i was a kid, which i camped in for years and years - although the seams in that did in fact leak like a seive.

 

just to be on the safe side you could pick up some visquene. this is basically a very thin plastic sheet that painters use to cover furniture. It's cheap, you can pick up a pack of it at Home Depot for a cpl $.

That way you could see how your kids tent does in the rain and if the rain fly's not doing the job you could through the visqueen over it at least as a temporary solution.

 

I boutght my "old style" Kelty Zen from Campmor for $130 (s&h included) my Eureka Zeus EXO 2 set me back about $125 at the local outfitters in Harpers Ferry WVA.

An alternative would be a sil nylon tarp. Tarps can be set up in various ways and if you use treking poles you can use them to rig up your tarp.

 

first off, i would hope you aren't the type of person who would want to contribute money to the pockets of greedy heartless bastards (including all the chinese beneficiaries), even if it means you get a cheaper tent but if you are, then i guess go ahead and shop at wal-mart.
secondly, i'd reccomend getting a tent with a fly that goes all the way to the ground(seeing as how rain seems to go with wind) and a built in ground sheet is key as well
my 3 cents pace

 

Get a dome tent. I have one and it's nice and roomy. They have them at wal mart as well as camping supplies you might need..