# Cabinet to Vivarium conversion



## Snookysnek (Apr 15, 2020)

Hey, posting here to document our first cabinet conversion from start to finish. Just to preface we went into this with pretty much zero experience with woodwork or cabinetry and had to buy almost all of the tools(or borrowed) used for this. Honestly it came out way better than we thought it was going to and I put that down to all on the threads on here and a lot of youtube videos that we watched trying to figure out how to do this.
Admittedly we only started taking photos after we had taken out the middle shelf and sanded it back. For those wondering we just used a rubber mallet to knock the shelf out and then used a claw hammer to knock the nails back through and then pull them out.

If you don't want to read the whole thing, the 2 pictures below are from start to finish.












The cabinet when we got it, had a flimsy mdf board on the back so we took that out and removed the middle shelf which served as top of the compartment for dvd players etc. We then sanded the entire cabinet and filled in the holes in the grain of the wood with wood putty. We used 40 grit sandpaper to remove the existing varnish and then went over with 180 grit to smooth it out.





Next we used a piece of dressed timber from bunnings for the back of the cabinet and we used wood glue and nails to secure it. We cut 2 pieces from the middle shelf we knocked out and used them for the top and bottom lip, we secured them with wood glue and dowels.









To cut our vent and cord holes we used a 60mm holesaw bit and then cut the rest of the vent out with a jigsaw. With all of the exterior done we varnished, installed the vents, cable duct and sealed all of the interior and ledges with pond sealer as well as sealing up the edges and corners with silicon. with that all done we screwed in our radiating heat panel.














For our branch we just found a felled tree not far from home and cut a few big branches off. To treat our piece we opted for the bleach method, you can find lots of videos on youtube on how to sterilise branches. We used what was left of the middle shelf to make ledges and then fixed them in using basic shelving brackets from bunnings. With our shelves in we laid the cabinet on its back and positioned our branch in and started foaming with our expanding foam.





We went with a mixture of 50/50 dolomite sand and brown sand which was applied onto a layer of black silicon spread over the foam. After that had cured we got a spray bottle and put some pond sealer in it and gave all the walls a decent spray 3 times over a day or so.








From there we just had to install the fake plants, the thermostat probe, tracks for the glass and the glass and lighting.
The tracks were stuck on pretty easy with liquid nails. The lights we used were just cheapo LED light strips from bunnings which were run around most of the top part of the vivarium, with the remote sensor dangling down just below the lip of the glass at the top. The thermostat probe was silicon-ed into the ledge below the radiator. The power cords all ran down the left side just inside the door and through the cable duct into the storage space below. The plants for the most part just wedged themselves into the foam and then were silicon-ed. The heat tile for the bottom hide was a cut tile with heat cord silicon-ed to the underside.



















I'm pretty happy with the results and thought I'd share.
If I'd do anything different I think it would be using grout over silicon and sand from a money standpoint( the black silicon for all 3 walls was about $100) but I also think it would result in a more natural looking rock wall and you can paint it whatever colour you want.

If you have any questions feel free to ask or if you have any critiques I'd love to hear them.
I'm getting ready to start another conversion for a Jungle and Rough Scaled Python we just got so any ideas for improvement would be fantastic.
Oh and the little guy in there is Chewie our yearling Caramel Coastal.

Cheers.

Edit: formatting is a bit weird, couldnt get some of the pictures to be side by side so the post wasnt so large


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## Dallas22044 (Jan 29, 2022)

That is very cool! Ive been think of making my own enclosure recently and was wondering where you got the heat panel and vents from


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