A New Cage for Anya

I think I mentioned in my last post that we wanted to make Anya an new home because the largest size commercial wire cage just wasn't big enough.  She is a big rabbit.  She could not even stand up inside it.  Getting her in and out of it was very hard, and slightly traumatizing to us both.  The door was too small and too far away from the far corner.  We put a litter box in there a while back and she has shown to be very potty trained.  She never pees outside of the litter box.  Her little bunny coco puffs fall outside the box, but are very easy to sweep up and not messy at all.  Anya is my daughter's pet, and lives in a small "office" connected to her room.  We envisioned a very different setup for her where Molly could get in there and sit with her and she could have a little house to climb in and run around when she wanted to.

Molly is taking Agricultural Science in school and has to have a yearlong project involving agricultural production.  She turned in a proposal at the beginning of the year saying that she would design and build her rabbit a better cage and that she would do a report on harvesting and processing her angora rabbit's wool.  She wanted to blend the fur with sheeps wool, card it, spin it, possibly dye it and knit something out of it.  She would take pictures of the process and have samples to show and tell.  I told her I liked the idea.

 

Here is Anya in her old cage.  This is the largest commercial rabbit cage we could buy.  It is just too small for her.  You can see her litter box.  She has both a water bottle and a water dish.  When we got her, she did not know how to drink from a water bottle, but she has figured it out.  We still give her a dish everyday, though.  She seems to prefer it.

 

The lady that owned this house before us obviously had rabbits that ran free around the house and peed and pooped everywhere, chewed on cabinets and scratched in corners, so I told my daughter that we can't just let Anya roam free all the time.  We compromised by designing a cage with a large waterproof floor and frame with a doggy fence inside.  The top is open and there is a gate you can open and just walk in or let her out to explore. We ordered a 3 foot tall eight panel fence from Petco.com and built the frame and floor from left over lumber from our other home improvement projects.

 

Molly measured and held the boards while I cut them with a skill saw.  They are 1 x 8's.  We did all this in our scary basement because it is subfreezing outside.

Here's Molly pre-drilling the holes for the wood screws. She is wearing gloves and safety goggles like she should.  Good girl.

 

I hesitate to point it out because after you notice it will be all you see, but I can't resist.  Look at Molly's legs in this picture.  I don't know what caused this effect in the photo, but she doesn't really have tiny little chicken legs, and her purple skinny jeans aren't that skinny.  I have noticed distortion from this camera before, but this is crazy.  It must be amplified by the perspective I took the picture from, wow!

Here is the frame after Molly used wood screws to put it together.

We had an entire sheet of 1/4 inch plywood in our lumber pile, so we put that on the bottom.  Unfortunately the sheet was not as wide as our frame so we had to be creative to get the whole thin covered.  You can see the diagonal seam in this picture.

Molly spread the vinyl flooring glue all over inside the "box." We had to wait for 45 minutes before we got to stick the flooring inside.  That was a chore and a half.  the vinyl we had was in a 12 foot long role and very heavy.  We cut a strip as wide as the bottom of the box and folded it up two sides then cut strips for the other two sides.

It turned out pretty nice.

 

Here are the seams between pieces.

We used bathroom caulking to seal the seams so that if Anya has a potty accident or spills her water bowl it won't soak into the wood.  She can't reach them through the wires to chew on them.

After a day of letting the caulking cure so the bits of hay wouldn't stick to it. We took Anya's old cage out and put her new one together.  Here she is.  She loves to just hang out in her litter box with her timothy hay and straw pellets. After this picture Molly and I made her a little rabbit house out of a cardboard box and gave her a towel to cuddle in.  So far she just really likes to toss them around.

We also gave her some pieces of cherry and birch wood.  She throws them around along with her jingly ball toy when she wants attention.  She is already much happier.  She is about a year old now and she isn't fixed so she can get a little bitchy sometimes, but over all she is very sweet and likes to be stroked.  She especially loves it when you scratch behind her jaw on her neck.  She has just finished shedding so she isn't very fluffy in this picture.  I spent the morning after the cage swap getting her used to people being in her cage and clipping her toe nails and a few mats she had developed.  She is looking really good.