Given what you will ultimately need for a cage you would be better building it in the basement. You really don't want to build a cage for an adult nile on a second floor of a house. It would require some modifications beyond what you want to do.

I am not sure how much soil weighs but considering the bags of topsoil you get at the store usually weigh 40lbs or so and are comparable in size to a standard bag of concrete (1/2 cubic ft.) and you will need probably 1 or 2 cubic yards of dirt or possibly more (27 cubic ft in a cubic yard which is 54 bags of concrete btw although it is different than dirt it will give you a ball park estimate on dirt.) that's a few thousand lbs of dirt.

On top of that water weighs 8.5lbs per gallon. If you use one of those pretty molded ponds that figures out to 850lbs for a 100 gal. pond. That's a lot of weight for a second story. You would need to seriously re-engineer the structure of your house in order to keep it from falling through the floor.

In the basement you could build the base of your cage using concrete blocks. You could even dry stack them and coat them with a surface bonding mortar (quickwall). You could then have a base that could hold dirt just fine and at a cost much cheaper than some of the projects I see on here sometimes. You could then build the top part of the cage on the base. With a bit of tweaking you could probably do a water feature for him in a similar although I would suggest doing homework and trying some outside ponds first. Obviously there are other possibilities but doing them in the basement is the way to go.

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