Transcript
[Music] so you guys can take advantage the door the motorcycle waterfall [Music] okay then [Music] hey guys welcome to my channel if you've never been here my name is kristen land and i upload videos when i can i have like 3 000 animals give or take so usually i'm busy feeding them and taking care of them however um i tried something brand new today i was asked to participate in the nano vivarium challenge sponsored by vision cages as well as josh's frogs and um i definitely took the word challenge seriously and challenged myself i've never made a vivarium which is crazy i don't know how that's happened i'm inspired though um so i've never been to vivarium until today well i've been working on this for more than today but you know what i mean um never made a vivarium also i was like you know what this is a challenge so it why not also make a custom diy rock waterfall man you are one pathetic loser so there was definitely some hurdles and challenges if you will in this video so i'll kind of go through um them in the video so that you guys know kind of like what i recommend doing other than what i did because i definitely learned from my mistakes with this there definitely has to be a first time for everything right so big thank you to vision cages they gifted me the 215 cage right here which is a smaller enclosure that's awesome for like dark frogs etc so even leopard geckos would be really awesome in there i almost did
leopard gecko cage but i decided to do you guys guessed on instagram you guessed that i was doing a dart frog enclosure and you are right i am super excited to have dart frogs as part of my collection i actually used to collect frogs when i was little i was frog obsessed and i've always loved the way dart frog vivariums look they just look so cool so tropical like i probably want to put a fogger in here at some point but anyways um there's also going to be a giveaway uh going up around this video and there is also a lot of other youtubers who participated in this challenge so after you finish here go ahead and check out their videos i'll link some of them the ones that i know of in my description box so you can check them out there i'll also link everything that i use in this video in the description box a lot of it is from josh's frogs and then of course vision cages gifted me the cage so i'll link that for you guys below as well and you'll notice i also did a voiceover in this video because um alas it was something new that i had tried and i definitely didn't want to have a bunch of choppy annoying audio where i didn't really know what i was talking about so i just waited till the end and did the audio there but i'm actually pretty like stoked on how this turned out so this is definitely more of like a let's struggle together video and learn some as opposed to like here's a tutorial on how to make a rock waterfall because there's definitely some things that i will do differently next time but um yeah so let's go ahead and jump right into the video i hope you guys enjoy and if you guys have any tips like if you've built one of these yourself and you see something in the video that maybe would be useful for myself or someone else reading the comments definitely leave that below that would be super awesome and one of the next videos that i put up here is going to be an unboxing of some dart frogs that i'm getting from josh's frogs as well and i will show them enjoying their new enclosure so be sure to keep an eye out for that hit the bell subscribe and let's go ahead and jump into the video by the way for the contest i don't
really have any of the details for that yet so once those are available i will post them on my instagram story at kristen lee animal so definitely check that out i used some sandpaper to um basically rough up the surface and then i grabbed a nail to kind of scratch out the back side and the two sides where i'm gonna put my foam foam doesn't stick super well to really slick surfaces so you're definitely gonna wanna rough up your surface then i vacuumed out all the little pieces because you don't want foam sticking to that and not adhering either for this project i decided to use the big gap filler i actually found this one that goes up to three inches um the one that i used to buy was only one inch so i'm using this for the entire background and i'm putting these like little net cups in there that i got off of amazon so that i can plant my plants in there i mapped out where i was going to put my little pond area and you have to build this up in layers with the foam or else it will kind of just collapse over so you have to let that dry and then do your next layer i actually used what vision cages sends as a substrate barrier so it doesn't fall out of the front but what i really should have done is you'll see later is use a thicker piece of that get it cut at home depot and then put it in there with aquarium safe sealant so it's waterproof the really cool thing about foam for vivariums is that you can stick cork in there you can put branches vines whatever floats your boat that you want to put in there and it will stick and adhere right to it i had a little tube cut and you can see me um foaming that in here that's where my pump power is gonna come through as well as the tube to get the water up towards the top i'm also putting in place a little solo cup i offer small insects to some of my reptiles in these so what i'm going to do is put this in here and then i'm going to use a fresh cup and put it in there every time i'd like to offer my dart frogs something like a small wax worm etc this is kind of a last-minute thing but i found some paracord and i decided to make myself some custom vines i would probably use something that was a little bit thicker and thinner so different variations but i basically covered these in some sort of silicone and i wish i
would have used glue and then i mixed a mixture of organic potting soil and moss and kind of squished them around in there and then there you have some custom vines i should do another tutorial on this because i feel like i could have done a little bit better okay so with foam it is too slick for silicone and things like that to adhere to it so unfortunately you do have to shave off or sand down all of the areas of the foam which is seriously such a chore but while you're doing this you have the opportunity to kind of shape things a little more like you like so i kind of ended up shaping some ledges out etc and then i ended up using a dremel tool for part of this because it worked a lot easier and it was a little easier in getting in some of the tight crevices than with this knife this is definitely a learning process for me and i don't actually know if you need to make the surface non-slick but for the sounded grout i use the poly blend sanded grout this is in like coffee bean espresso i think and i made some mistakes here with this because my time constraint but you really should do about five layers of this at least three i only did one and it does end up peeling and cracking off a little bit so i will tell you that there is also an alternative that you can use that's specifically meant to go on foam or styrofoam it's called foam coat and it's from like the hot wire foam factory i'll link some of that stuff in the description box for you i got some natural paint colors here i really wish i would have gotten some blue as well and you'll see why later but these are just little sample pieces that i got or sample um paints that i got from home depot they were pretty affordable they are also water soluble so you can dilute them if you want i ended up just dry brushing kind of the lighter color on the different rocks where they stick out more and then i was going for kind of a mossy look with this so this is actually the first time i've ever painted any sort of vivarium so this is my first try probably going to get better at it but i actually used makeup brushes for this
because they were the best ones that i could find for the job like home depot just kind of had like crappy brushes so i am lucky enough to have tons and tons of makeup brushes so i sacrificed a few for this project and with painting you just want to make it look realistic you know dry brushing is kind of the best thing to do with that this is some dynaflex stuff that basically is ready to be painted within an hour and it just i just put this right over the area that i was going to be putting my substrate on the sides of the enclosure because i wanted to be there to be a little bit of a difference between the rock area and then the rest of it so i ended up spreading this out and i actually ended up running out of it you'll notice i needed to get a little bit more of it i should have gotten a few of those but i spread this out with gloves on and then i ended up just putting and pressing on lightly my organic potting soil onto the sides of it and i did the back panel first let that dry and then lifted it up and then did the side panel and that was that and i wasn't too worried about the fact that i didn't get to cover the bottom of it with this stuff because i'm gonna put substrate there anyways this is also a really good spot for you to kind of silicone in and glue in your vines if you made any of those so getting the vines to say was a little bit challenging i should have made that a little bit more of a priority but also you can see the foam kind of shows through right here so next time when i do this which i'll talk to you about later about how i'm going to do this i won't need to color my plexiglass which will look a lot better so to seal um the area that i'm gonna have all the water in i'm using i think it's called flex seal you'll see it on screen in a second um but i'm gonna cover this entire area i bought two types i bought the kind in the little jar that you're seeing me paint on but that started to remove my standard grout so i switched over to a spray bottle or not the spray can one of this and this is also non-toxic and food safe you really want to make sure you're using non-toxic
liquids and things when you're making cages that animals are going to be in you also want to give your um set up time to off gas before you put your animals in so the idea with this and the big goopy one that i had was so that i could fill all the cracks in for this pond area but later i'm going to talk to you about a new way that i'm going to try to do this in the future on the next one or actually maybe with this one i might kind of dismantle a little bit but i'll talk about that in a little bit this is the pump i'm going to be using this is an led piece that you can kind of put anywhere in here that lights up um in future like i'm going to like i said i'm kind of going to be probably redoing a lot of this stuff with the stuff i learned throughout this process but i'm gonna be getting a pump that has a filter to keep the water cleaner but for now i'm gonna use this guy this is my tube that goes onto the pump and then i put some holes here so that when we put the pump or the piece up here the water will trickle down again this is my first time doing one of these so it's totally kind of an experimental process i cut these wires so that i can fit this through the screen up here because we need to get it to a power outlet and then this is the other piece so i'll put that together in a minute i got all of these awesome freaking plants from josh's frogs i got them um these all actually came in the vivarium kit the tropical vivarium kit which is really cool because you don't have to do any thinking you just buy that and you get all these plants these have actually grown a ton i also got all of these cute little bromeliads frogs absolutely love these so you just know that these are going to be good for a tropical environment you don't have to do all your research which is really cool also says on here what they are which is awesome i'll take a picture of all these so that i can go buy these like if i just need a replacement this one i really want to do somewhere where it probably like somewhere like this
because it is a creeping fig so it will take over kind of the whole background [Music] maybe like that one back there okay so i actually ended up feeding all of this electric and this pump up through here and then running it through there i'm going to talk to you guys a little bit about how i'm going to correct some of the issues that i had with this enclosure right now on planning these little guys but i actually watched a josh's frog's vivarium waterfall video after i made this cage and i wish i would have watched it first but um basically i need to build up the very front of my cage to be waterproof for about four to five inches and i ended up putting that plastic piece in there after i already laid foam so it's unfortunately not waterproof and the cage is very shallow so i'm gonna go to home depot and have a very thick piece of plastic cut and then use aquarium safe sealant to really make sure that that's totally waterproof up to four to five inches then what i'm gonna do is drill some holes in my little pond area because they actually use like really malleable like foam type material that water is easily able to flow through and then they did a very thick layer of drainage um so that the water just sits under the entire enclosure and then all the plants they planted there actually drink that water thus keeping the water a bit cleaner so those are the steps i need to take um and i'll probably do that in the next couple days here but on to the rest of the substrate and the layers that i did i'm gonna be using this for a drainage layer one thing i really like about the josh's frogs one which i've never tried before this video is it's extremely lightweight and typically these are pretty heavy in my experience so we do a layer of this so that like all the substrates can breathe so pour a bit of that in here then i have a substrate barrier you're going to put this over top of
your drainage layer just so that your substrate doesn't get down into that and it can continue aerating the soil and doing what it does best it's kind of an awkward little area for this so i'm going to just kind of cut this as best i can to fit so that's what i've got it's not perfect but it'll definitely work next i got this it's this is like living substrate so this is um atlanta botanical gardens this mix is premium substrate for naturalistic bivaria it's got um it says it's perfect for growing a wide range of tropical vivarium plants so you can actually use this to plant the plants and little holders if you want i just wasn't sure if i was going to have enough so this has like sphagnum moss in it all sorts of good stuff so this you can see here we've got the false bottom the substrate barrier which we put on now we're going to put the abc abg i keep when i say abc um and they were actually out of sphagnum moss when i placed my order so i didn't get that but there is some in here and then i got some leaf litter to go on top as well this actually has pieces of charcoal in it too which like your springtails and isopods and whatnot can munch on so this is a really good substrate i was worried about this not getting up high enough to the water for the frogs but it definitely worked out just fine this is some leaf glitter that i got i'll also link everything here for you guys in the description box below and then i also got some acorn caps i really like this as opposed to going to the pet store and getting it because this is such a bigger like this is a much larger bag at the pet stores they literally give you like four leaves so this is like 100 times better this piece my dog actually started to chew up it did have more moss on it but
this is a galapagos um mossy bark piece i think it's called so i was kind of gonna just set this in here so they had somewhere to hide behind for the pump and the electric i actually fed that up through that pvc pipe that i had put in the foam background so that worked out really really well i disconnected the wiring and shoved it through there so i was able to fit it through there without actually trying to fit an entire plug through the top screen if that makes sense i'm filling this up with rep to safe water and as i start filling this up the gap between the plastic and the front of the cage you can see that fill up with water which would be totally fine if i had had a waterproof piece in the front and that's what this is missing and a thicker drainage level so i'd adjust the um water flow at the top quite a bit because it was actually dripping out the side of the enclosure so i definitely need to work on my technique with shaping waterfalls so that i can control the flow of the water but i'm actually pretty stoked with how this turned out and i'm glad i ended up putting the video and hopefully the next one will be less of a learning lesson and more of a tutorial for you guys thank you so much for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] you
