This is a photo of the four-story cage I built this weekend for my degus. It's completely double-gridded because degus are about 1/3 the size of a guinea pig.
This is a photo of the four-story cage I built this weekend for my degus. It's completely double-gridded because degus are about 1/3 the size of a guinea pig, and we have babies too.
This cage took over 300 zip ties in the making.
We have two exercise wheels, because there are seven degus in there right now and they will fight over the wheel if we only have one. I made a custom hay manger, and they also have a wooden hidey-house. They love climbing the walls of the cage.
One, I put the grids inside the coroplast base, instead of outside. This is because degus are big chewers and I want to keep them from chewing through the base walls.
Two, for the upper levels, I made a slight (two inch) lip on the coroplast floors. This is to keep bedding on those floors inside the cage as much as possible.
I love how you secured all the corners with the zip ties which really makes the whole structure secure from all the hoping and running they must do. great job =0).
It is very sturdy. In the whole thing, we used about 330 zip ties. I expect that they will chew through some of them, but we have replacements
The front is a little overzipped because I hadn't got the hand of offsetting the ties yet, but then I figured it out and we used rather few ties on the other sides. The top is actually covered in coroplast, so that we won't have to double-grid it, and so they will feel safe from an aerial attack
It took FOREVER! The double-grid took an extra four hours or so. Next time (god forbid there ever is a next time!) I will be able to do it more quickly, but this time I was just figuring it out as I went along.
I'm surprised I didn't dream of zip ties last night.
Thanks so much! They are still loving it. I recently replaced the top level, because they had chewed it up a lot. They spend most of their time on the top level, but they take a mid-morning nap on the bottom, in a pile of hay
Wow, it looks really nice! I have one concern though. Because the grids are laid on top of each other, can they get their feet or nails wedged between the grids while climbing? I wanted to build something similar for my rat (she loves to climb!) but I was worried about her toes getting stuck.
Wow! It's great! Now...if only we could all convince the storage grid people to make the grids smaller, so none of us have to modfy it and we can start giving C+C cages to our smallest friends. (I dream of the day!) But until then, double sided is a wonderful idea.
I think it's a great cage! Unfortunately, I don't dare try a C&C with my 3 degus, because they are HOUDINI in fur! I swear! They'd chew through the cable ties and let themselves out by lunch time. :-(
