We re-purposed the old pigsty in the backyard to become a tiny house for our rabbits and chickens. The top picture is now the rabbitry part and it houses 2 bucks and 3 does, these are my breeding stocks. We kept a lot of scrap GI sheet materials in the old run-down pigsty knowing that these may come in handy someday. I'm glad that we didn't throw these away because we used them all up in building the rabbit hutches.
We made a two-tier steel frame rabbit hutch with two hanging cages on each level. The bottom picture shows the steel frame inside the doorway. Under the cages on each level, we made a slanted floor made out of scrap GI sheet materials and then covered these with cheap linoleum. The bottom of the slanted floor has a pvc pipe that was cut in half and this serves as a gutter. The wastes and urine that falls down on the slanted floor goes to this gutter and then it goes to a bucket with a strainer. This strainer serves as a screen to separate the urine from the wastes materials. The urine drains into a pvc pipe that goes into the creek and this leaves the wastes behind which is then taken out and put in a closed bin with earthworms on it.
All of our 4 cages are made of all-wire welded wire mesh material. The size of each breeding cage is 2.5 feet wide by 3 feet long by 18 inches tall. Based on the numerous research that I've done on the internet, this is the ideal space for a medium sized breeding doe and her litters as it can accomodate a nest box. Since I have only four cages at the moment, I placed 2 rabbits in each cage. When I bought them, they were only 2 months old and I thought it would make them feel better if they had company. I will be separating each of them soon after we finish making the rest of the cages. I plan to start breeding them by mid July as they will be 18 weeks by then.
