Tessellated Hamster Supply Box - Render
One of the first things carpenters learn to make is a wooden box—since I’m already starting off as a designer/artist but with nearly zero carpentry experience, I’ll start with making a bunch of boxes fitting into another box.
My only issue I had as a guinea pig owner was storage space. Pet stores sell very boring looking toys and hideys (huts made for rodents to hide under), but I bought them because they’re cheap and even though they’re ugly, guinea pigs don’t really have a preference. (GuineaDad, and their sister website BunnyDad, have the cutest hideys I’ve seen on the market, as well as HayPigs. But these are on the expensive side—I got one of those products for $30 and it was chewed up in less than a week, same for a rabbit I used to have.)
Having a bunch of individual hideys for rodents takes up a lot of space in closets and gets unorganized and messy easily—hideys and toys haphazardly thrown into the shelves about to fall on top you any day now—especially if you’re keeping all your supplies in one space like I did. This is starting to sound like an infomercial, but it was my genuine experience as an unorganized guinea pig owner.
Guinea pigs, if you keep them well fed, don’t tend to destroy fabric & fleece accessories quickly (though their waste will eventually ruin it in a year or so), but they will chew incessantly on anything and everything else—namely plastic and wood (things made out of something edible are gone within the month).
Given that I want to:
1. Make something cheap to make (plastic, wood, edible, ceramic, fabric)
2. Safe for rodents (plastic, wood*, edible, ceramic, fabric)
3. Lasts at least 6 months (plastic, wood, edible, ceramic, fabric)
4. Not super heavy (plastic, wood, edible, ceramic*, fabric)
So wood is the easy choice to me. *Basically any wood is safe for rodents—except for certain wood chips if they’re dusty; wood could be expensive, but I’m using cheap plywood. *Initially this project will be totally wooden, but this is going to be basically a rodent (hamster - the design itself works for whichever critter I want, but I’m downscaling it for cost & I’m new to carpentry so if I mess up I haven’t wasted much money/wood) starter kit—so it will include 2 hideys and 2 food & water bowls, the last of which should be made from ceramic since I can’t find a pet-safe waterproof method for wood at the moment. I’ve found pet safe paint, which I might use to organize some colorful toys into the kit if I have time after it’s finished, but it doesn’t properly make the bowl safe for water.
Anyway, this is the design for it, based on tessellating shapes and perfectly fitting organization designs (will be shown as part of my object-to-object submission):
I think it’s clear what I’m going for here; the components fit perfectly into the box like a tessellation. The box will have some sort of hinge on it, I think, because I don’t want to make the lid interlocking, and it also looks nicer.
Since it’s going to be a bit plain initially (when it’s submitted) I want to do a very easy & cheap to make surface design on the outer box—I want it able to be presented out in the open, something not quite possible to do with the hideys I’ve had. I’ll decide/write about what kind of pattern I’ll do later, but this method of using a heat gun, scorch marker, and Cricut vinyl stencil makes very nice, clean surface designs on wood, though I’m not sure if I have access to a Cricut.
A more tedious method is to probably cut out a pattern from printed paper and simply rub the marker into the design I cut out, but it wouldn’t be half as clean, even if I used masking tape, I think—I’ll test it out on something other than my finished box.
Maybe it’s possible to decorate the surface with hot wax (fine for hamsters—they eat it in the wild, after all, and it can be cleaned off) and animal safe dye, a method I’ve seen used on fabric, but not wood… there might be a good reason I haven’t seen anyone else do it—maybe it doesn’t work—but I haven’t seen anyone else do it and it doesn’t hurt to try.
