Last night, since my Husband was home to keep the girls busy, I tried again. I felt so great! Building my own cages with wire mesh (cut panels) and j-clips - I even had to buy j-clip pliers and felt that this surely was something people did not have unless they were farmers. Seriously, why would you need j-clip pliers unless you were building cages or collapsing fences or some other farm type structure? Anyway, I was on a roll and built one of the cages. Great! Then I opened up the stack kit box, which can be added to one of these cages right away or years after purchase (it said on the website). What it did not say, however, is that if you are planning to use the stack kit, you should NOT put any j-clips on the first two crossbars of the four corners of the cage. Guess where the cage directions tell you to put the clips? Yup, I had about 12 j-clips in the wrong place.
For those who don't know, a j-clip is a piece of hard metal that's about 3/4 inches long and about 1/2 inch wide that, from the side, is shaped like the letter j. You place the metal j in the j-clip pliers and position the pliers over the two pieces of cage wire you are trying to connect, they squeeze the pliers making the j roll and curl over itself, turning into an o with a little overlap. Nice, strong hold. Good, sturdy cages. But how does one get those lovely little metal o's off? Well, they do make a tool to remove j-clips. I could have ordered one and had it shipped to my house. But then I would have bunnies with no cages. And yes, before you ask, I did go to the local feed store to ask if they carried j-clip remover tools, to which the guy behind the counter asked "what's a j-clip?". They didn't carry them. So before I ordered the tool on-line, I decided to try and really give it a go with good old fashioned woman power. I grabbed two big sturdy pliers, a junky old screwdriver that I was willing to give up to the cause and got to work. It took me over an hour to remove all 12 clips and my forearms are KILLING me. Prying, pinching, trying to hold the clip with pliers in my left hand while trying to pry open the overlap with the pliers in my right hand enough so I could get a better grip and rip the sucker open. Ugh, it was quite the "learning experience". But I did it. There is now a perfectly constructed 30x36 inch rabbit cage, with legs, a waterer, a hay rack and a food dish all attached and ready for little Juliet up there. There is a slide out plastic tray under the cage so I don't have to take her out to clean the cage and the door is just hard enough to open that the six year old can't get it open at all. Perfect! So now, all I have to do is build Gnomeo's matching abode and stack them. I'll post a photo of them as soon as they are completed and stacked, awaiting occupancy.
I hope you like your new digs, Juliet, because it was a labor of love...and I will not be doing it for you again!
