Another move to another room!

So the room is finally finished and it's time to make the move from the outside room into the newly built garage room.  I moved my single rack in and then began the building stages of a new much much bigger rack. I had the room I finally needed so I decided to get started.  I was going to build a three tub wide and five or six tub tall rack.  So this rack would would either hold 15 or 18 tubs in it depending how much room I left between the levels for air flow.

Here's the beginning stage of the new rack.  I went with smaller hardware cloth on this level because I wanted to keep African Soft Furs and also mice in this level and they needed the smaller hardware cloth.  Once I got the level done I added it onto some legs and moved it in the room.

Here is the beginning of the new rack next to the first small rack.  As you can see the walls are fairly shotty and ugly but the rats don't care what they look like, it keeps the temperature in there what I need it to be and that's all I'm worried about.

A view through the doorway into the room.  A little blurry but you get the idea.  plenty of open room and space to grow!

I got this first level in and running and then about a week later I added the second level to the rack.

Now that I had the room I started to expand rather quickly.  At this point all eight tubs were completely filled and I had more babies about ready to come that I had to make room for.  I was slammed at work, the baby and girlfriend were also taking up a lot of time so I had to pull some long nights to get the next level added but it was definitely worth it in the long run.

I got three levels on, my small rack, and even more room to grow.  Everything is looking good and I'm starting to get customers that are wanting weekly orders.  I had a request between all the customers for over 300 rats a week.  I wasn't able to produce these numbers just yet but I was definitely trying.

The big project begins!

So this will be mainly a photo post to show the progress on the room and everything that was done. I left you last with a messy cluster f*ck of a garage.  This would be the beginning of a long big project.

This is the beginning, the garage corner is starting to get cleaned up.  I still had a lot of work ahead of me but luckily my dad was willing to lend a hand any time he could.  After cleaning the debris and all the junk out of the corner I now had to remove the shelving.

Once the shelving was removed it was starting to look more promising.

 What's a room without insulation?  We insulated heavy, not too heavy that it would be ineffective but as much as we could while keeping it working properly.

I came home from work and the lumber fairy had dropped off some wood to begin putting up walls and a ceiling.

 After all the wall insulation was in place and secured we started putting in a ceiling using the pre-existing rafters for the garage roof.

It's starting to finally come together and get me excited for what's to come next!

Got some studs up and finally getting the real layout of the room.

I went to work, came home and saw this.  Apparently my dad thought it would be a nice surprise to finish the room for me.  I didn't complain one bit :-P

Time to move on

So I moved all the snakes inside for a week or two long vacation from the outside room until they were to be picked up by their new owner.  The time went by so quick it only felt like two days before he was here to pick up his newly purchased snakes.  On the flip side something that helped me get over the loss of my snakes was the renovation of the spare room in the house they were kept in for their final weeks.  My girlfriend and I (mainly me since she was pregnant) gutted the room and completely redid the room in anticipation for the arrival of our baby.  We had names picked out for either a boy or a girl and had room designs ready for both boy and girl as well. We had doctor appointment after doctor appointment and found out we were having a healthy boy.  We were both excited mainly for the fact that he was healthy but on top of that we both were wanting a boy.  We decided on the name Landon Joseph and also to go with an Airplane design for his room (I went to school for Aviation). We spent the next couple winter months preparing the room for the soon to be arrival of Landon.  At this point now it's just a waiting game for it to warm up to make progress on the rats and also waiting game for Landon to be born.  For the sake of an even more boring blog let's fast forward a little bit.  Spring time comes and after a lot of thinking and planning I decide for the rats to build a shed for them in the back yard.  I get my material list ready and I'm about to go to the store when my girlfriend comes up with a brilliant idea to use part of our detached garage.  The layout of our house/driveway/garage is a little weird so we don't use the garage for our cars, just to store junk lol. She suggested using a corner of the garage that way I would use two walls of the garage and would only have to build two walls and a ceiling.  This allowed me to use the almost same amount of materials for twice the size room.  Of course you know I was excited about that, twice the room for basically the same cost, sign me up! Only problem was this would postpone the project for a couple days to a week because I had to clean the garage.  And this is where I will leave you for the day, a dirty messy garage picture to be updated shortly!

The garage corner pre-cleaning

Everything was put on pause

Size of the room I had my snakes and rats in.

I've lost half my stock now, I've got a cold room filled with ammonia, and I've just lost all hope and drive to continue doing what I am doing.  It's quite sad but the whole situation got me depressed and I was ready to just give with all of it and be done.  It would have been much easier but in the end I knew it wouldn't be what I really wanted so I sat down laid all my thoughts and ideas out and just started brainstorming.  The only good news coming out of all this sadness is that my female ball pythons went off feed (which is a good sign they are ready to be paired with males) which meant that I may be looking at some eggs very very soon.  I was slightly optimistic but I didn't want to get my hopes up so I decided I needed to first scale down the rat breeding.  I sold off everything I had except for two females and one male which would be enough to feed my snakes for the time.  I figured I would keep everything small until spring/summer came when I could open the door and get better air flow going.  It was a very slow few months as I waited for the warm, not much happened except for pairing my males to my female balls for three days then moved them back to their own tubs for three days, then back and forth, rinse and repeat.  At this point now my female ball pythons are starting to get fat and I start to get as giddy as a school girl.  Finally what I had wanted for so long was starting to happen.  My whole journey was about this, breeding my snakes, getting some eggs and watching the eggs hatch.  I don't think I could be any happier at this point and I'm sitting on top of the world! I get a call the next day from my girlfriend and she shares some news with me that changed my life.  Turns out we are pregnant!  I was elated and this was just the icing on the cake.  New baby with my gf, about to have snake eggs, rats are finally done dying off it was good news all around.  Again I get some bad news to rain on my parade.  My girlfriend who wasn't too fond of snakes to begin with is now freaking out about having a baby in the house along with multiple snakes on the property, this was a war for the ages! I put up a long hard fight to keep my snakes but in the end I couldn't put my snakes ahead of my girlfriend and our soon to be baby so I caved and did the last thing I wanted to do.  I put all my snakes up for sale and watched all the e-mails and calls come in with questions about my deal.

Four of the snakes moved in for their last two weeks.

After what seemed like 1000 e-mails and 500 calls I finally found a buyer that was willing to take my snakes as a group.  I was allowed to move them inside for their last two weeks with me before being sold. I set up a time to meet with him and decide on a fair price and then the count down starts :(

Too good to be true!

Hairless Dumbo Rat

After a week or two in the new room I was all adjusted and was working well while in there without bumping into anything or feeling cramped.  I was anxious to continue to ramp everything up and go as big as I could.  I had been attending my local reptile show and was looking at new snakes and seeing what I wanted to do with the five I had. *Side note, I recommend you find a local reptile show near you and check it out, they usually are once a month and are cheap to get in.  Even if reptiles aren't for you go and check out a show, they aren't these vicious killing machines everyone has chalked them up to be.  Also  http://www.youtube.com/user/SnakeBytesTV is a VERY informative YouTube channel that was created by one of the world's largest snake breeders. *  Back to my post :-P , so while at the reptile show I noticed someone selling pet rats with some genetics I was interested in.  Yes all my rats are feeders but it is a breath of fresh air opening a tub and seeing something other than all white or all black, it's nice to have some variety in there.  After looking over what they had I decided on purchasing one male hairless dumbo rat, one female hairless dumbo rat, and one female dumbo rat.  A dumbo rat has ear that are more rounded and on the side of their head instead of on the top of their head, a hairless is exactly what it sounds like, no hair.  I rushed home, put them in a new tub, got them water food and a piece of wood to chew on.  I checked over them for the next couple days and then this is where it all started to go down hill.  I now had about 20 adult breeder rats and about 50-60 weaner rats along with my 5 snakes in this small room, I walked in one day to check on my rats and I had lost nine rats in one night! I was astonished and dumbfounded.  I had lost my brand new hairless dumbo female, four other breeders and four weaner rats.  I sadly pulled all of them out, cleaned and sprayed all the tubs and then went about my day.  I checked them again that night as I would every other day and to my surprise five more dead rats.  At this point I'm beyond mad I'm just sad and broken down.  That's 14 rats within 24 hours.  I did some looking around and it was either a disease within my collection or it was the fact that I had zero air circulation and the ammonia was building up causing them to die.  It was now November and was too cold out to leave the door open for air flow so I had to put a small fan in there to try to circulate the air and it helped a little bit but I had too many animals in the small room. To make matters worse winter was coming and even with a space heater in the room it was still too cold over night for anyone to survive.  I put up PVC butcher flaps along with a thick blanket to keep the heat from escaping out the door. This helped with keeping the heat in but in the same respect it kept the ammonia inside the room as well.  I feel like at this point everything is against me and there's no winning or being able to progress.  I had some thinking to do to see what was possible or if I just had to give up :'(

Wanting to grow!

I've always been the type of person that I don't just step into things, I leap! So when I start doing something I don't like doing it on a small scale, I want to go as big as possible.  So my breeding was now improving I was running into little mistakes here and there but nothing serious.  I would lose a pinkie here and there, or I would have a water bottle get stopped up and they would go a day without water. It got to the point where I was breeding more rats then I had needed.  I was ending up with about 20 rats every two weeks but only needed four rats a week for my snakes.  I reached out to my buddy who also breeds snakes and asked if he was needing any that I could sell him.... And then it began.... I sold my first round of rats to him for $25.00, which isn't much but for my little work, the fun I had, and the small scale I was doing it I was hooked.  I was always wanting to grow my snake breeding and now my rat breeding I decided I needed to grow. Here's the problem, my girlfriend.  She wasn't a big fan of the snakes nor was she a fan of the rats in the house.  I live in Ohio where the winters are cold and the summers are hot.  It was approaching fall time so I couldn't just leave them outside.  The garage isn't attached to the house nor was it insulated so that wouldn't work.  Then it hit me! I have an outside storage room attached to the house that wasn't insulated but was small enough that it wouldn't cost much money to get it ready.  I came up with a material list and then off to shopping! I got insulation, drywall, new door, and a light for the room.  I spent the next three days getting the 4ft x 8ft x 8ft tall room ready for the big move!  I got it all done (was not pretty but the rats and snakes don't care about looks) and I moved everyone out.  It took a while getting used to working in a small room but I quickly adapted and was excited to have free will over what to do in the room.  It seemed as if it couldn't get any better, and I was right, it quickly spiraled downhill.

Getting started

Pict. 1

After breeding my roaches and raising my bearded dragon I thought of possibly breeding him.  I thought it would be a fun cool experience and I was starting to look into and learning about the genetics and what could be bred and all the exciting options there are out there.  While looking into all the genetics and gathering all my information I stumbled across some Ball Python pictures.  I looked into some of the genetics and morphs (mutations) and I was instantly hooked.  I went out and bought my first ball python and then shortly after bought my second, then my third, then my fourth, and finally my fifth.  I went from feeding one small bearded dragon every day to now feeding five growing ball pythons and my bearded dragon.  Ball Pythons being a snake didn't eat the roaches I was breeding and had to start buying mice or rats every week.  $10.00 a week just for rats was starting to get to be a pain between driving to the store to pick them up, and the cost I thought there had to be a better option.  I figured since I'm already breeding roaches why not look into breeding rats?! So I did some research (notice a trend here in researching before starting anything? lol ) and good thing I did because I was about to go out and buy 10gallon fish tanks for all my rat breeding.  I found out people build rodent breeding racks or rat racks to breed the rats in.  The design is simple, use a tub to house the rats, rails to slide the tubs on, and a mesh top to keep the rats inside the tub.  I decided to start small and built my first rack (Pict. 1).  The food sits on top of the metal mesh and the rats are able to eat through the mesh. I started by putting one male and four female weanlings together in a tub and let them grow up together as a little family.  Females can safely be bred for the first time around the four month mark.  Once the female has been impregnated the gestation period is around 22 days.  Around the two week mark you should start to see the abdomen expand, it will start to look like she swallowed a golf ball and it starts to expand up until it looks like she swallowed a baseball. Since I am a smaller operation I decided to leave all my rats together throughout the whole process.

So I built my rack, my rats have grown up and were sexually matured and I then had two pregnant females.  I was starting to get anxious and excited to see what size litters I was going to get (average is around 9-14 pups).  Finally the day came I saw seven little rat pinkies and I was elated! I couldn't stop looking at them and peeking to make sure they were alright.  The next day I went in to check on them and I look and to my dismay there's only four! I was so upset I thought me checking on them repeatedly and opening the tub all the commotion scared her and she ate the babies.  So when my next female had her litter I did a quick count and then left them alone for a week only making sure they had water.  After that week I went in and excited to see pinkies all grown up and not a single one in there. :'( I was so upset again I thought what did I do wrong? I checked their food, I checked their water, I made sure everything was good and I reached out to my forum buddies that had helped me get started and they assured me most new mothers will have a problem or two with the first litter. After my initial newbie mistakes I finally got a litter that made it past the first week and I couldn't wait for more!