Alterations

So having lived with the cage for a whole three weeks, we went back to the drawing board and changed it.
I kid you not.

The problem was that I had constructed the cage on the floor in the living room, then moved it and placed it on the cupboard so when we looked at it from the comfort of the sofa the flip top with the mesh and the top shelf blocked out our view of them on the wheel.
Which is where typically they spend most of their time.
So this needed to change, which meant a serious alteration the front section, and door frame.

However on a smaller scale there were little improvements to be made to the way the house worked.
For example I had to place cut up bits of cage and metal over a couple of vital inner bits of pine like the wheel struts and the mesh top frame.
I had made these out of pine so they could be chewed, but as always with Degus they will find a way of testing the security of their home.

These were fairly simple and merely involved trimming bits of cage mesh and securing it to the wood.

However one observation was that the sandbath was so filled with substrate from being on the same level as the shelf as this next picture will show of the first 24 hours worth of activity.

 Obviously there is not much point having a permanent bath in there if they are going to fill it with hay and Finacard so I decided to raise it slightly. This was a simple frame of pine, measured to fit the bath which would then in turn sit on the shelf.

And it was that easy.
They will always kick bedding into the sandbath, but by raising it just slightly so the lip isn't directly on the level keeps it fairly clear and only needs to be sieved out twice a week and the Goos feel the benefit of this being (relatively) clear and always there.

 After putting the Degus in the DIY build I had sensibly opted to preserve the Thickets cages in case we needed them.

 

Realising that the alterations to the front would take a few hours and involve drilling , sawing etc on their house I didn't want to put them in the travel cage so the first hour of the day I altered the DIY buikld were spent rebuilding their original Thickets cage. 

I also decided that if we moved house or had problems further down the line (with potential introductions, destructive Goos, etc) we could probably do with a large secure cage so whilst the double was of no further use a single one would nicely fit in the shed to be broken out for emergencies.

I stashed the girls back in their first home and tried to fill it with a few hours worth of entertainment.

As you can imagine they were quite bemused, or unamused by this.





With them safely stored the first thing that I needed to do was to remove the flip top.
As you can see from the photo below this finished some 50mm above the top shelf and was casing the vision obstruction.

I had to build another front frame, extending the length by 50mm.
Because I had an entire Thickets cage left I cut more pieces of mesh to fit the new length rather than cut more perspex.

The major job was that in order to accommodate this change I had to drop the door frame by the same distance.
This process started with removing the frame completely (doors and all) and cutting the digging pit down by 50mm.
At this stage, at the insistence of my better half, I checked the remaining perspex in the shed.
Low and behold there was enough perspex now to replace the MDF shield for the digging pit with clear material, which would not only allow more light into the cage, but also meant with the improvements to the top that we could see them where ever they were in the house.

Whilst not build related that then gave us this effect when they are in the bottom which, I will admit, makes for a far more interesting view.

So with all the major building work done (touch wood, cross fingers etc, etc).
It was time to finish the lounge off aesthetically.

Out of MDF I made two doors .

I hinged these to the cupboard.

Added magnetic catches.

Then tested them.

And the (nearly) finished article.
All that remained was to paint them the same colour as the walls (the cream walls!!!!) and it would match in completely.