I currently have 2 turtles. As an owner I constantly look for ways to improve their aquarium life. This time around I decided to make a house for the turtles, which allows them to go out of the water or hide in the shadows from the bright light bulb.

Previous experience told me not to use wood to build the house. The problem with wood is that it changes properties while being underwater and there is no good way to keep everything together. For example, glue might be poisonous and nails can rust. These problems set me on a path of making a house as one solid piece and there is no better material for this than the good old concrete!

You can see the design of the house from the picture. Basically, I dug up some large pieces of styrofoam I had laying around and cut them into shapes. The shapes I glued together with hot glue. The trick is to make the outside of the house with styrofoam such that you can fill it in with concrete. I also had to add extra reinforcements, because styrofoam alone cannot hold the weight of the concrete.

Finally, I filled in the concrete in two parts. I filled in everything before the roof of the house, then I glued the styrofoam shape for the roof to the pillars and filled in the rest.

Total cost:
$5 concrete
$10 glue gun and glue
$1 for styrofoam

Total time:
2 hours to make styrofoam shape
30 minutes to pour cement
3 days to set cement

Tags: aquarium, decorations, habitat, house, red ear, turtles

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Do It Yourself. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.