Cage

For the four bins in which I have my mice, I wanted cages with several key requirements. Enough head room for the mice to stand on "tip toe", maximum floor space, good ventilation, and ease of cleaning and access. In order to obtain all of these, I purchased the Large variety of cat litter pans. Other types of plastic bins that have been recommended are the plastic bus bins that restaurants use, and cement mixing tubs. Sterilite and Rubbermaid containers also work, but one must be careful to purchase a bin with no ridges, indentations, etc that the mice can get their teeth into and chew through.

Once I purchased the cat litter pans, I had simply to purchase the materials for the lids and make them. When I went to the store, to make four cages, I purchased the following:

Also needed for this building project was a staple gun, some odd pieces of wood remnants from cutting the right lengths for the cage lids, and 56 1 1/4 inch nails. Remember, 1/4 inch hardware cloth is the necessary size. Anything larger and mice can escape.

When you add in water bottles, 4 @ $2.99 each, the rough cost for the building of the cages is a little under $10.00 per cage. Later on, I plan on purchasing four more cat litter pans, so that when it comes time for cage cleaning, I can prepare four fresh cages, spend less than a minute transferring the mice, nests even, over to the clean cage, and then move on to the next cage. It will result in the minimal cage-cleaning disturbance from me, and minimize cage cleaning time for me, so I can just dump and clean four cages at once and they can air out for several days before having the mice in them again.

Once all the pieces are purchased, the actual construction can begin. Below is a picture of the dimensions of the cat litter pans:

With these dimensions, I have to only allow an extra 1/4 inch in the side pieces that I cut. For one cage I cut three pieces which are 15.5 inches long, and two pieces which are 19 inches long. In this way I will have a lid, like the one below, to use on the cage:

To make the lid, I formed it in it's final shape and used a staple gun to hold it roughly to the proper shape. Afterwards I placed one corner of the hardware cloth to one corner of the lid, and stapled it down. Using some tin-snips (wire cutters will do) I cut the two sides which extended past the sides of lid. Next I took six nails, and nailed in the ends of the three cross bars. There are two reasons for the two crossbars. One of them is for stability, so that the lid isn't resting on the cat litter pan only on the hardware cloth itself. The second reason is that the three to four inch space created on top is a good food hopper and place for the water bottle. This can be filled up with lab blocks, or dog food, or whatever you feed your mice, and will reduce the amount of food the mice will spoil.

After nailing the structure together, I took four scrap pieces of wood and on the same side as the hardware cloth I nailed them to the corners, further increasing the stability of the entire lid, and reducing the chance that the lid will be pushed off by a careless person, or a determined mouse! As a final touch duct tape was spread all around the edges of the lid to soften the few protruding edges of hardware cloth and reduce the chance for splinters from the raw wood.

The result is a serviceable lid that gets the job done with little hassle. It isn't a beautiful lid, but it works.

click to enlarge

When Mousedom grew beyond the proportions of one shelf, a metal shelf was purchased. You can see this in the picture above. Two of each lid described above were attached to each other and then screwed into the metal supports of the new shelf. The allowed me to slide two of the large breeder bins under the lids and rest lightly on the shelf below. This wasn't quite a tight fit, so we have a small plastic wedge we place under the cage to lift it into a very tight fit with the lid. We also attached another shelf which was a hanging "lid" structure used to cover up three smaller cat litter pans which are used as nurseries. A place where one or two momma mice can have litters and be undisturbed by weanlings, males, or other female mice. That picture will be posted soon. When finished, that rack plus the plastic rack detailed above, held 7 large breeder bins, 9 small nursery bins, and 9 critter keepers. On the table in between the two racks are another breeder bin, and a half sized breeder bin usually called the "thin bin". On the bottom level of the metal rack are two "weaner bins" which hold weaned mice, the larger bin holding females, and the smaller one holding males.
[Mice]
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