Pet palace! (Fun Area Leon Rodent Home)

Member Name: nursie_nursie

Product:	Fun Area Leon Rodent Home
Date:	13/02/09 (117 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Huge, great for the price, comes with accessories.

Disadvantages: Finding somewhere to put it?!

As a kid I always wanted a hamster, gerbils or a rat, I don't think I particularly cared which. My mum would never let me saying that it wouldn't be fair on them as we had a cat and that as she was the one that would end up with the job of cleaning it out she wouldn't let me. I now, at 28 years old have the option to do whatever I like! Well, kind of. My other half and I rent an apartment and so after a look around a Pets At Home store one day decided we wanted a pet, we really liked the dwarf hamsters and asked our letting agency if we would be allowed to get some and were given permission.

I looked at information on all different rodents, including Degu's which we liked the look of too. In the end it was decided that gerbils were the best option. Knowing what we would buy I went looking for a large cage that would be ideal for them and also for our pocket.

I hate the idea of pets being cooped up in a small cage with no room to run around and play in the way that they should be able to, so finding a large cage was important to me. I looked for what must have ended up being hours! I came across this cage and fell for it, the thing is it was out of stock. I kept looking and even tried to find this exact cage on another site but nothing. Apart from going over the one hundred pound mark and it being a ridiculously large cage there was nothing.

I waited for weeks and weeks for it to come back in stock. In the end my mum said she would buy it for me for Christmas as she knew it was something I really wanted, possibly because I moaned so much about it being out of stock for so long!

The website has an option where you can be emailed when it comes back into stock. This made life easy and when it came back into stock I popped to my Mums and we ordered it along with a few cage accessories.

It didn't take long to arrive, less than a week. The accessories came separately and arrived after about three days.

The cage section was already assembled so it came in a HUGE box! There wasn't much assembly involved at all, the floors needed to be put in which is easy enough and not fiddly. Before putting it together though I did feel the need to sand some of the edges as they were very rough and I was worried I would get splinters.

The caging itself is very close together (6.72mm) so makes this suitable for very small rodents like mice too. There is a small access door or the side of each of the three levels and a large door on the top. These are all nice and tight when shut so there is no need to worry about our gerbils becoming Houdini.

The base is nice and deep, made of thick white plastic which means that it is not suitable for Degu's as they are likely to chew through it in days. The fact it is so deep means that the bedding is less likely to go everywhere when they dig through it, Brian is the exception to this as she makes as much mess as possible!

This is a very big cage and measures 67 x 36.5 x 65 cm with this amount of space it would even be suitable for, I would guess two rats. Our three gerbils could be joined by one or two more and not feel in any way cramped. My other half joked that he could move in!

They supply four plastic clips to secure the cage to the base, these are really well made and even though our girls chew everything they tend to leave these alone. It seems they can't get the right access to them or that they just don't taste all that nice to them. You only need two of these clips, one at each end so you have two spare. They are very trust worthy clips and don't wiggle about or make you worry that the base will fall off every time you lift it.
They supply two handles that clip onto the cage to help you lift it.

This is a heavy cage, where it is so big it is bound to be! It isn't the sort of thing that a child could move on its own so someone will have to help with the weekly clean out from that point of view.

Two ladders come with the cage to make sure your pets can get to each level, these have hooks to hook it on to either the caging at the side or there are two very small holes in the flooring by the opening. Both ways work really well but you can't hook them onto the flooring once the floors are in. They are solid with bits removed to add grip so your pet can easily run up them.

The cage comes with a solid plastic wheel that attaches to the side of the cage, this is USELESS! It sticks, is noisy and will only realistically fit in the bottom floor as that level is slightly higher than the other two (I should point out that the wheel in the picture must be a lot smaller that the one supplied!). I am planning to get another wheel to go in my cage as one of our gerbils (Cleveland) loved the wheel but she kept getting caught out and going flying when it got stuck!

You also get two wooden tunnels, a house and a seesaw.
The wooden tunnels are great, they wouldn't however be big enough for a Syrian hamster or anything larger. They have the bark on the outside and look nice too, one is a little shorter than the others. Our gerbils love running through these.
The house, looks like a little house, it has a doorway and a window for access and a red roof. It did need assembling but that was a really easy job. As it has such a lot of colour on the roof I soaked and rinsed ours in warm water first to remove the excess, and boy wasn't there a lot of excess! Our three fit in this house easily and love pulling out all the bedding and filling it with chewed up paper instead!
The seesaw is a novel idea, our girls don't use it that much. Stewie likes to sit in the middle and make it clack either side by just moving side to side. The noise from this on a wooden floor might annoy you but if you were that bothered just putting it on top of bedding would make it silent.

There is lots of room to put in accessories for your pets to play with and gnaw on. I love watching our girls run from the bottom of the cage all the way up to the top at full speed! They love playing and running after each other and if they were in a smaller cage they wouldn't have as much to do.

Cleaning this cage isn't the easiest as the floors need to be taken out each time to give them a good clean and then put back in. I keep changing the way up that they get put back in as they come out slightly bent where they are in nice and tight. I wonder if the floors will last all that well as where they are thin, only about 5mm they might get really out of shape, replacing them wouldn't be a big deal though.

When we bought this cage it was on sale and had an additional 10% off (this is still available on everything on the website with your first order) and it came to about £58. Now that it is not on sale it comes in at a whopping £89.90 before any discounts.

I don't regret buying this and our girls love running around it, let's face it it's probably more space than they had before coming home with us!

Summary: I really do recommend this cage it is the best I found for the money and really is a good investment