Indoor Enclosure-Elongated Tortoise

[Animalia]

OK! So, as anyone has checked my introduction page has learned, I am the brand new owner of a female elongated tortoise. Her new name (as I had been calling her Franklin before I learned her true sex) is Tulip. Welcome home, Tulip. I have already learned SOOO much from these forums, I have been reading the old and new topics. I wish there was more information specifically on elongated tortoises, but I am hoping that the information I am gathering on red-footed tortoises will be good enough.

She has been living in a very temporary set-up and I knew it was not adequate. I spoil my animals and it did not make me happy to have her in such a poor set up. It was a move up from her original home in a small laundry basket but I knew there were better ways. As I told my dear husband, we may have her the rest of our lives so we might as well prepare. (He was a bit shocked at this. I think he was still convinced she would be going back to her original owner in four years when he was done with vet school.)

This project began early Saturday morning (the 3rd). I had stayed up late the night before reading tortoise forum and was so inspired by some of the awesome enclosures I had seen. It was my birthday and my husband was working and I thought to myself, "for my birthday I am building a new tortoise enclosure." I headed out to Lowe's first thing with the idea to buy a large rubber tub. get some dirt and moss, some plants, and I would be good. (I still need better lighting/heat emitters but that is another journey). Well, when I came to the rubber tubs I thought to myself, "these tubs are $20.00, I could buy a bookshelf for about the same amount, line it with plastic, and she will have an even better enclosure. But if I am going to be retrofitting a bookshelf, it's really not going to be as deep as I would like, I am going to have to do work anyway, why don't I just build a new enclosure from scratch?" It all made so much sense in my head. It didn't matter that I am about as handy as a monkey with a hammer and I would be making it up as I went along...I was just excited!

So, logically it made sense to buy plants first. Of course. I have never really had plants because cats eat the ones indoors and the dogs destroy the ones outdoors so just buying plants and deciding to keep them healthy is a new thing to me. I printed off a list of edible landscpaing from this website
http://africantortoise.com/edible_landscaping.htm
hoping that as long as I got things on this list that I would be ok. I decided to go with the expense of buying established plants because I didn't trust myself to be able to care for seedlings long enough to get them established. I purchased 10 plants based entirely on "hey, that looks kind of cool" (as long as they were on the list). They are:
"Freestyle Pink" Ivy Geranium
Henna Coleus
"Pink Delight" Butterfly Bush
"Grassy Lassie" Aloe Hybrid
Provence Lavendar
Iceplant
"Burgundy Glow" Bugleweed
Strawberries
Elijah Blue Fescue
"Merlin's Magic" Coleus

(Anyone see something I need to not include?)
I am taking the advice of the "cleansing store bought plants thread" to try to eliminate as much chemical residue as possible.

Plants purchased, I went to Home Depot this time to check out wood. Stay tuned for further adventures of a tortoise enclosure newbie with large dreams.

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I will be back after my dentist apppointment

 

[Yvonne G]

Oh, Jamie: I can tell right off that you are going to be a fun person to have on the forum! I'm looking forward to reading about your tort-table-building progress. Good luck with keeping the plants alive. It was a good idea to buy them first, that way you can be watering the bad stuff out of them before you need them in the habitat!

 

[Animalia]

OK, back from the dentist. A healthy mouth is a healthy mind. Or something. Back to Saturday...about 10:30 am by this time.

I had to gather up my mom and her truck and I prefaced it as, "hey, wanna hang out on my birthday and shop? Yeah....shop at Home Depot." She is only slightly more handy than I am and apparently neither of us have a very good sense of final sizes and dimensions (which probably turned out for the best). We decided to just build a great big box that would sit on the floor. I have a mostly empty living room and that's where I figured we would put the enclosure. We started with a 4x8 piece of plywood for the bottom and bought plywood and 2x4s for the sides. OK, anyone who is now thinking "4x8, that's gonna be enormous!" has a better grasp of carpentry than myself and my mother. Yeah, and it's going to have 2 foot tall sides. I also purchase some organic not vermiculite soil, spaghum moss, some individual pots for the plants, a pretty blue planter bottom for a soaking tray, watering can, a large round hanging planter I am going to make into a humid hide, plastic sheeting, and some slate tiles (they were partially cracked so I got them to reduce the price a little).

Hey, that doesn't look like a lot of stuff. We can do this no problem!

Hmmm, it looks a little bigger up against my garage door. But we can still do this! Hear us roar!

Hey, we have power tools!

OK, so I am going to measure out this line on this piece of plywood and chalk it straight. Oh, I am so smart. I even know how to use the Skil Saw! No Problem!

Hey, whattya mean I put the line in the wrong middle? Oops. Good thing I hadn't cut yet!

Safety First! See that eye protection and dust mask! It's getting dark but we are cuttin' fools!

I cut wood. ROAR!

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So I decide that we need to go ahead and get some supplies together for the lid. So we head back to Lowe's this time but for whatever reason we don't think to take the truck. We take the old Lincoln towncar. That's a working woman vehicle if I have ever seen one.

OK, so we buy some 8 foot long pieces of wood and some screen, and some hinges and we check out and say, "how the heck are we gonna take this wood home?" It's like the freakin' three stooges with us. Luckily, the Lincoln town car is built to hold about 1500 cubic feet of passengers so wood and us get home unscathed.

Wood is safely delivered.

At this point my husband gets home from work and as he had no idea I had anything planned when he left this morning is justifiably shocked when he gets home to all this madness. But being the great guy that he is gets right in and starts helping.

Eight feet is big. It doesn't all fit in my camera frame.

Side pieces

Chalk line so we know where to screw in the side pieces (definitely not my idea, I would have just tried to guess)

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Screwing together the frame

Two sides mostly on! Woo hoo!!! (Ignore my husband's back)

It's looking like a box!

Dear Hubby decides the we should put on legs, as that would make it a true tortoise table. Oooh, that's special. And then he admits he wants it to be able to double as a war-gaming table for miniature war gaming....sure, we'll see. But legs are awesome!

So this is where we stopped yesterday. We have decided against the screen as it won't help keep the temperature and humidity stable, and it won't be a good war gaming surface. We are now on the look-out for plexiglass. We plan to build a couple doors that hinge up and back. We need to finish just a little bit of framing in, I am going to paint the interior before lining it with plastic, I have to figure out a way to set up the lighting and heating and then I can turn it into my zen rock garden, garden, tortoise enclosure. I am super excited. And although it is absolutely HUGE, I am glad to have the ability to give Tulip that space and I will have the flexibility to do all kinds of neat stuff inside.

An outside enclosure for her would actually be more difficult to maintain the proper humidity because we are so dry out here. I would have to have a constant misting system, I think. Which isn't totally out of the ballpark, but I think this will be a great place for her to live either year round or at least all winter. And it should last for a very long time.

Ok, so stay tuned for further adventures of Tortoise Enclosure of Ginormousness.

 

[Yvonne G]

You were lucky that your husband came home when he did, and that's he's a nice guy to take over the project! However, I think YOU deserve quite a bit of the credit for buying the right stuff!

Good job!!!

 

[muddoc]

While I am new at the tortoise thing as well, I have been keeping reptiles for the majority of my life, and I have been keeping snakes as a breeding "business" for about the last eight years. I have built about 80% of the enclosures used by my snakes, and consider myself a pretty good carpenter. With that siad, I wanted to say thank you for the great laughs. I laughed the entire time I read your posts. I needed that. It looks as if your cinstruction project is coming along nicely, and I can't wait to see the finished product.

Good Luck,
Tim Bailey

 

[Animalia]

My husband calls this style of carpentry "red neck engineering." It may not look beautiful but it will work. This is in contrast to my own natural style which could be described as "monkey engineering." This means that if it doesn't work out I get angry and hit it and grunt.

I have actually primed the interior of the enclosure and while it dries I am going to go hunting for plexiglass. I am trying to get as much done today as possible as my next day off work is not til next Sunday.

I am going to post in the lighting forum for some advice on what type and how many lights/heat emitters I will need and where I should place them.

 

[Itort]

If you can get a hold of hardwood mulch or cypress mulch add that to the substrat. My forsten's promptly buried themselves in it on arrival home.

 

[Weloveourtortoise]

WoW!!! that is huge!!!! great job so far! can't wait to see the finished product.

 

[spikethebest]

very nice pics!! thanks for sharing!!

 

[terryo]

Can't you work through the night? I'm dying to see the end result.

 

[ChiKat]

haha this reminds me of when my mother and I built a tort table a few months ago. Except yours turned out much better I'm pretty sure I ended up crying at one point during the process haha

Anyways, it's HUGE! I can't wait to see the finished product Great job!!

 

[llamas55]

I love how the legs are supporting corners, and under both

 

[Lori J]

YES! YES! It is very roomy.. I can not wait to see the finished box either.