Cage Building: The Hayloft

My two guinea pigs, Ginny and Sakura, happily shared this two-level C&C (cubes & coroplast) cage for over four years.

Adding the second storey to create a hayloft gave the girls extra room, and also contained most of the hay.

The Hayloft

This hayloft used fleece and towels, rather than disposable bedding, like Carefresh.

Let’s face it — hay sticks to fleece.  One little thing that helped quite a bit was to place a square of flannel underneath the hay rack in the hayloft.  A matching square also provided a lightweight cover for napping after a snack in the hayloft.

A set of three mini-grids was used to create a central, free-standing hay rack.

This hay rack was easy to fill, and held a nice amount of timothy hay.

The girls enjoyed eating and sleeping in their spacious hayloft.  The central hay rack design encouraged sharing, but never allowed one guinea pig to become too possessive of the hayloft and hay rack.

A C&C (cubes & coroplast) cage is easy and inexpensive to build compared to buying a simple guinea pig cage at the local pet store.  C&C cages can also be easily customized and changed.  There are some wonderful ideas here:

• Guinea Lynx:  Housing
• Guinea Lynx Records:  A Home for your Guinea Pigs

An earlier version of this post can be found on the Guinea Lynx Forums.

Sakura’s single-level cage photos are here, and the photographs for the mini-loft are here.