Beginnings of a tort room

huff747

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I live in St. Louis so there's going to be a lot of the year I'll need to keep my leopards indoors. They're still quite small so they're in an enclosure in my office currently but I've been slowly accumulating supplies and equipment for my room.

When we bought our house it had a partially finished oddly shaped room that we basically used for storage until now. I cleaned it out during spring cleaning, purchased some shelving and a grow lamp to try and keep my potted food growing better in the winter time. I ran some electrical into the room over the winter.

Here's some early progress. The grow light has been hung and I had some plants in there:



Around the corner:



From the back corner:



Shelves hung:


Around the corner with shelves:


With my biggest cactus moved in, and heater just sitting there but plan to use it to bring up ambient temps:


Another shot from the back (you can kind of see my power strip mounted to the wall as well):


This weekend I purchased tile, some concrete backer board, etc as I plan to tile the floor and a little ways up the wall so that they won't be up against the drywall and so that I can put down substrate on tile and protect the walls. I plan to use the selves to hang some heat lamps for basking spots and for hanging other UV lights. The grow light can have UVB bulbs as well but I'm not sure it's close enough to the floor.
 

Yvonne G

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Your profile says you're in Glen Carbon, Illinois. Have you recently moved to St. Louis?

Is this room off the kitchen? Looks like it was supposed to be a food closet/pantry. This is a nice spot for a tortoise and plants. Be sure to keep this thread updated.
 

huff747

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Glen Carbon, IL
Your profile says you're in Glen Carbon, Illinois. Have you recently moved to St. Louis?

Is this room off the kitchen? Looks like it was supposed to be a food closet/pantry. This is a nice spot for a tortoise and plants. Be sure to keep this thread updated.

Glen Carbon IL is correct which is basically a suburb of St. Louis. I commute into downtown St. Louis for work and I kind of figured that nobody knows where Glen Carbon is so I say St. Louis.

I do plan to keep it up to date. I thought I had taken pictures of when it was used for storage and then when it was emptied out too but apparently I did not. I was hoping to have all the steps. But I'll try to be better from here on out.

It's not off the kitchen, it's in the basement and in between the living room and the bathroom. So they could have made the living room larger although it's already pretty big. The back part of the L runs behind the back of the bathroom so I debated trying to look in that wall for the water lines that run to the shower but that's probably a bit more than I want to take on and since it's right by the bathroom I don't have far to go to get to water so I'll call that good enough. It's a pretty decent sized random room although there were no outlets originally, just the two light fixtures.
 

Greta16

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What a strange room. It probably was sopposed to be a pantry. My parents had one like this in their basement. Great job fixing it up like that. Can't wait to see the end result!
 

Rylatts

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Looks like you have a lot of luck growing the prickly pear cactus. had mine for a while now hasn't done anything :(

Tempted to place it outside when the weather gets warmer.
 

huff747

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Sunlight.
It'll take off in the sunlight.

Ditto to that. Mine takes off in the summer and then nearly goes dormant in the winter. I'm hoping this grow light will help with that and so far it seems to be. I've gotten new pads starting in several spots so we'll see how they develop under the light. But every bit of growth you see is pretty much from them being outside last summer.
 

huff747

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I've always liked the idea of a dedicated tortoise room.
But my wife stole it for her birds.:rolleyes:

At our old house at one point I had pretty well taken over the basement with ball pythons. I had hundreds. So getting approval for this little odd room as a tort room was nothing compared to that. She is also less put off by tortoises than she was snakes.
 

Alicia Hoogstra

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Wow! I am going to convert half of my craft room for my babies! Living in MI they'll be inside all winter while they are small. Once they get larger especially Luna (my Sulcata) I'll build an insulated heated building for her.
Keep the ideas coming!!
 

ZEROPILOT

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Ditto to that. Mine takes off in the summer and then nearly goes dormant in the winter. I'm hoping this grow light will help with that and so far it seems to be. I've gotten new pads starting in several spots so we'll see how they develop under the light. But every bit of growth you see is pretty much from them being outside last summer.
The cactus in pots in my front yard grow at about a third the rate as the ones growing in my back yard and the only difference the duration of sunlight.
 

huff747

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Been a bit behind on updates. Got the tort room set up a bit more, enough for them to move in. They seem happy so far. First couple days I was worried as they didn't eat much but guess they got adjusted as they're back on full feed. Still working on a good way to keep the shower pan liner up. Don't really want to resort to staples but may need to.

From the entryway of the room:
IMG_5056.jpg
And the back side of the room:
IMG_5057.jpg
 

huff747

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Glen Carbon, IL
And the inhabitants who in 1 month from tomorrow will have been with me for 2 years. Cool how different the patterns/colors are and I think I've done pretty good on the shell smoothness, by no means perfect but not too bad?IMG_5061.jpg

IMG_5059.jpg
 
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