The Pet Project – Part 9

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It’s about a month since Rudolf and Danny joined us. One fun thing about having additional inhabitants of the pet variety joining our family is that a good portion of our time gets oriented around creating things for them! We’re already into version four of their enclosure! I’ll do a separate post on that later.

In the mean time, and after getting inspired by a YouTube video, I decided to do a simple maze for our two cavies. I didn’t want the maze to be of the throwaway type though, which meant that the base materials had to stand up to cleaning and easy washing. And for that, the best all-round material that’s both affordable, reasonably sturdy and easy to work with remains coroplast boards.

Coroplast boards are pretty much widely available in book and stationery stores here, and we picked up four pieces from Evergreen Stationery @ Parkway Parade at $3.10 for a 75x52cm sheet (Popular has them at $3.20, but you get the usual 10% discount as a member). This was a daddy-daughter Art N Craft project, and we spent our Saturday night constructing it up. The maze base is 80x55cm, and constructed from two sheets, with 11cm all round walls on the side.

Pictures!

The usual tools for the project: rulers, cutting boards, paper knife, and both transparent and also insulating tape. We ended up just using exactly three of the four coroplast sheets.
The first thing we fixed was a corridor width of 11cm, and a wall height of 11cm also. Tall enough I hope so that they won’t cheat by jumping across walls, and not high enough to scare them either. Passage width all around is also 11cm – so space for the cavies to move around and ke balakang pusing (i.e. 180 degree turnaround for our Ang Mo reader!) when they run into dead-ends.
The finished project 2.5 hrs later.
Rudolf and Danny giving it a first go. The maze is a little small after all, so we’ll look into building extensions later. Danny was also just able to, with some effort, climb over a corridor wall and cheat LOL.
Hannah quipped: “Hey bro, your bum is in the way!”
Good photo opportunities, since the cavies are basically moving down straight passage ways towards the lens!

I reckon it’s possible to build even larger mazes. Weight is a non-issue – coroplast boards are very light – but whether the resulting maze is too wide to hand-carry is a real consideration! The thing needs to be able to be carried past our typical Singapore-wide room doors into shower stalls for cleaning.