Piggie Mom
Junior Guinea Pig
Hiya everyone,
I've completely missed out on being on the piggie forum this summer
So much has been going on so I've simply not had the time. However, that certainly doesn't mean there's been no action for my piggies! We've actually changed their cage twice (three times if you count the very short-term one), and we've also moved houses due to a renovation, so it's certainly been eventful for them too. I thought I'd make this short summary of everything that's happened since I last updated you so that I can maybe get back to some more regular postings again 
To start the summer off we finally updated our cage, our trusty cage that we'd had for Lakrits and Nöpö was a 120cm x 60cm two level cage, and it had been very wonderful with only two piggies. It was however, simply much too small for Lakrits, Söpö and Oreo, especially when we got Töpö to keep Söpö company after Nöpö's passing. We got a stacked 2x4 c&c cage from amazon, the songmics brand, which I can recommend! I wish we could've gotten an even bigger one, but it simply doesn't fit without the rest of my family having to sacrifice one of the walkways, so we settled on this as a starting point. The piggies loved this cage and we did too (it looks so stylish if I may say so myself!), but sadly Töpö and Söpö fell out once again (this time I only let it get to bullying as I didn't want to risk Töpö revolting and harming Söpö on accident) and we suddenly were in quite the predicament; what to do now?
Here's the cage while the little monsters on the upper level still were friends... I've sewn the haybags and many of the liners myself, following very helpful guides from this forum!
I decided to split their cage into two 2x2 c&c cages rather than risk one injuring the other. The solution wasn't ideal, but we simply didn't have enough grids to immediately make the cage bigger and I wasn't willing to once again have the stress of "will they fight, when will they fight?" with Söpö clearly not knowing how to be bossy, but also not accepting to be the submissive one... We immediately ordered from amazon another pack of grids and my plan was to expand the bottom into two 2x3s. We also had another challenge, we were going to move from our house into an apartment for a few months, and a three wide cage couldn't fit out the door, so with amazon being very slow at delivering to Finland and the moving date closing in we did the best with the cards we'd been dealt and waited with expanding the cage for the two weeks until our moving date. During this time the piggies got to enjoy extra lap time and got to go outside more to compensate for the lack of space.
The cage while waiting for moving day
Moving itself was no easy feat, but we borrowed a van from a friend and got the cage moved without having to reassemble it which was very luxurious! The first day we let the piggies settle into the new environment and the next we started expanding the cage. This was quite tedious as we didn't want to completely disassemble and then rebuild it but we got it done in a day (the original cage took us three days to build
) And this setup has worked great.
We didn't have enough coroplast for a second loft, so that was added a week later and I've since bought another litter box too as Söpö is way too messy otherwise! I'll see if I could snap a picture at some point of the final product, but today the lighting is simply terrible.
In an ideal world I'd extend this cage into being at the top a 2x6 or even a 2x7 (a 2x8 is simply impossible, we've got nowhere to have that :c) and the bottom into two 3x3s or one 3x3 and one 3x4 but I've yet to have managed to convince my family that we could give even more space to the piggies, so that is still in the process...
Lakrits turned seven this summer, which is insane! I truly can't believe how well he's still doing, he's a bit more lazy than before, but otherwise you couldn't guess that he's an ancient little guy. I however do fret over what I am to do once he does pass over the rainbow bridge. I've been considering trying to bond Töpö to Oreo and neutering Söpö, however if that doesn't work I'm quite lost as to what I could do instead, I'd hate having them all separated and I would love to find them all a friend, but at the moment it seems quite the challenge to figure out what to do next with these piggies. I've been telling Lakrits it'd be best if he simply decided to live forever so that I don't have to ever solve that predicament
Kisses from the old gentleman <3
I'll be posting the original c&c cage and the updated one in the thread for those as soon as I've got a picture of the completely finished one, but I thought this could be its own update. Hopefully you and your piggies have had a wonderful summer with less drama than ours!
I've completely missed out on being on the piggie forum this summer
So much has been going on so I've simply not had the time. However, that certainly doesn't mean there's been no action for my piggies! We've actually changed their cage twice (three times if you count the very short-term one), and we've also moved houses due to a renovation, so it's certainly been eventful for them too. I thought I'd make this short summary of everything that's happened since I last updated you so that I can maybe get back to some more regular postings again To start the summer off we finally updated our cage, our trusty cage that we'd had for Lakrits and Nöpö was a 120cm x 60cm two level cage, and it had been very wonderful with only two piggies. It was however, simply much too small for Lakrits, Söpö and Oreo, especially when we got Töpö to keep Söpö company after Nöpö's passing. We got a stacked 2x4 c&c cage from amazon, the songmics brand, which I can recommend! I wish we could've gotten an even bigger one, but it simply doesn't fit without the rest of my family having to sacrifice one of the walkways, so we settled on this as a starting point. The piggies loved this cage and we did too (it looks so stylish if I may say so myself!), but sadly Töpö and Söpö fell out once again (this time I only let it get to bullying as I didn't want to risk Töpö revolting and harming Söpö on accident) and we suddenly were in quite the predicament; what to do now?
Here's the cage while the little monsters on the upper level still were friends... I've sewn the haybags and many of the liners myself, following very helpful guides from this forum!
I decided to split their cage into two 2x2 c&c cages rather than risk one injuring the other. The solution wasn't ideal, but we simply didn't have enough grids to immediately make the cage bigger and I wasn't willing to once again have the stress of "will they fight, when will they fight?" with Söpö clearly not knowing how to be bossy, but also not accepting to be the submissive one... We immediately ordered from amazon another pack of grids and my plan was to expand the bottom into two 2x3s. We also had another challenge, we were going to move from our house into an apartment for a few months, and a three wide cage couldn't fit out the door, so with amazon being very slow at delivering to Finland and the moving date closing in we did the best with the cards we'd been dealt and waited with expanding the cage for the two weeks until our moving date. During this time the piggies got to enjoy extra lap time and got to go outside more to compensate for the lack of space.
The cage while waiting for moving day
Moving itself was no easy feat, but we borrowed a van from a friend and got the cage moved without having to reassemble it which was very luxurious! The first day we let the piggies settle into the new environment and the next we started expanding the cage. This was quite tedious as we didn't want to completely disassemble and then rebuild it but we got it done in a day (the original cage took us three days to build
) And this setup has worked great.We didn't have enough coroplast for a second loft, so that was added a week later and I've since bought another litter box too as Söpö is way too messy otherwise! I'll see if I could snap a picture at some point of the final product, but today the lighting is simply terrible.
In an ideal world I'd extend this cage into being at the top a 2x6 or even a 2x7 (a 2x8 is simply impossible, we've got nowhere to have that :c) and the bottom into two 3x3s or one 3x3 and one 3x4 but I've yet to have managed to convince my family that we could give even more space to the piggies, so that is still in the process...
Lakrits turned seven this summer, which is insane! I truly can't believe how well he's still doing, he's a bit more lazy than before, but otherwise you couldn't guess that he's an ancient little guy. I however do fret over what I am to do once he does pass over the rainbow bridge. I've been considering trying to bond Töpö to Oreo and neutering Söpö, however if that doesn't work I'm quite lost as to what I could do instead, I'd hate having them all separated and I would love to find them all a friend, but at the moment it seems quite the challenge to figure out what to do next with these piggies. I've been telling Lakrits it'd be best if he simply decided to live forever so that I don't have to ever solve that predicament
Kisses from the old gentleman <3
I'll be posting the original c&c cage and the updated one in the thread for those as soon as I've got a picture of the completely finished one, but I thought this could be its own update. Hopefully you and your piggies have had a wonderful summer with less drama than ours!
