Building the Bunny Hutch

Yesterday Doug, Ashley and I built/remodeled a bunny hutch for Peter Rabbit and the future rabbits we will be getting soon.On the farm, we had this old chicken coop/house that no longer holds any chickens - that egg that appears to be in the picture is actually a golf ball (I have no idea why!). It had doors on it like a cowboy saloon and a ton of chicken roosts for them to lay their eggs in.

 

First, I "demo-ed" the coop by taking out all of the roosts, the old boards, that random white shelf and those white brackets. Then I added two 2x4s on the right and the left side of the hutch to support the mesh platform where peter will live.

 

That part was super annoying because I had to walk around to the back of the hutch (where there were lots of spiders!) to drill through the back wall into the beam. That took some finagling but once it was done, the rest came together a lot easier. After those beams, we nailed some small wood strips all along the walls at the same height as the wood beams (see the brown wood above).

Then we added a 2x4 across the doorway and a thin beam down the middle for some extra support. Once we had all of our beams in, we started stapling some sturdy wire mesh to all all of the beams. In some places where the wire had to meet but there wasn't a beam, we zip tied it together for extra stability.

 

Then to protect our bunnies' feet and to add even more stability, we added a layer of plastic garden fencing and stapled that down. We also trimmed all of the zip ties so they wouldn't poke the bunnies.

 

Then we added a nice thick layer of hay, Peter's water container, and a door made of garden fencing.

Now Peter is happy as a clam in his new bunny hutch!!

 

Here's a view of the final product! All we need now is for Ash to make it a cool sign telling everyone that is the bunny hutch. Once we get worms - hopefully this week, we will have the bottom filled with tubs of worms, compost and bunny poop!