Cuteyptooty
New Member
I want to share my quick and easy tortoise enclosure. My 21 year old son and his tortoise live with me. The tortoise was originally housed in a clear rubbermaid container. He is very used to watching TV (he likes Family Feud), watching us, watching the dog. He is our first tortoise and we find him very social. So our challenge was to build an intermediate sized enclosure that he could see out of, but not clear glass because we understand that can stress them. We also have limited wood working tools. I ended up finding a rather inexpensive cold frame online. We bought and built it and put a plywood floor in. As the tortoise doesn't chew we waterproofed with a spray rubber and food safe silicon. Made sure there was absolutely no smell before substrate was added. A couple cup hooks for the lights. We were going to drill a hole for his mister but decided to just crack the top open for airflow on both sides and we put the mister tube over the backside. Whole project, not including substrate, less than $200 cad. We are going to purchase a larger water dish and make something to climb but I wanted to share what we made for others looking for a relatively inexpensive solution. This is sized to be an intermediate enclosure. He will definitely need one at least twice the size in a few years and my son will be on his own by then and hopefully have more space for an enclosure. Cold frames seem to come in many sizes so I don't see why a big enough one for a full sized wouldn't work for a red foot or smaller tortoise. Did we do ok? It's 35" by 31". Changes? Again we know this is an intermediate enclosure.