Sam in the process of building a 48 x 24 x 24 wood enclosure for my collareds. It is 1/2 inch plywood on the sides and back, the front has 2 sliding plexiglass doors. The track for the doors was set into a piece of plywood "trim", this also serves as a substrate barrier. He also added an oval shaped glass "porthole" about 2/3 of the way up on each side. After some stain it is looking pretty nice. The top will be removable, a frame made of the same plywood with some heavy screen. Another feature of this enclosure is a "door in the floor." It is a hinged piece on the bottom near the back that opens up to allow electrical plugs or whatever through. There are small holes along the lip of the door just large enough to allow the cords through once the door is shut. I will use bathroom grout to seal these holes and around the door, it can easily be scraped off and redone if I want to redecorate. I'm thinking I will put the heat mat on the directly on the bottom and cover it with a piece of glass. I don't know what it cost because Sam won't tell me, but I wanted to tell you about the rock walls. We were lucky enough to come across a pile of shale during our travels this summer. It is thin and sort of flat and many pieces have fossils embedded in them. It is my plan to use them to "tile" the back and sides. They are about dinner plate size and cut to the sizes I want quite easily. I'm planning to place some horozontally across the corners on the hot side for basking shelves. I washed the rocks repeatedly and then put them in the oven at about 400 degrees to make sure they have no parasites. I am going to use ceramic tile glue and then will go and cover that and any bare spots with some mason's grout, the kind with sand. After all the glue and grout work is complete I will set the whole thing out in the sun for a couple of weeks to assure there are no fumes. I'll post some photos when I get the rocks in, it is about to that point.
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Valerie
