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Step 2Prepare the room!
Before you do anything, decide what room you want to use for your FR. Building a Free Range is not an easily reversible decision, although we intentionally avoided drastic measures for some degree of reversability. If needed, we could convert our free range back into a serviceable bedroom in a couple weekends..
We chose our northeast-facing bedroom, right next to the master bedroom, but across the hall from the bathroom. This bedroom has the most continuous wall space, so we could make a HUGE and spacious free range- but it does go around an angle...complicating design and construction slightly. It receives the most sun and a lot of natural daylight. This is advantageous, because we have found that our chameleons seem to enjoy having a line of sight to a sunny outside. All that sunlight makes it the most naturally warm room in the house, and while it seems like an advantage for a room full of reptiles to be hot, that's not always the case: melleri hail from the mountains, where it's cooler. We will compensate with thermostats to shut off all heating devices when the mercury climbs, and we replaced the bedroom door with a simple screen door to keep air flowing (and the cat out.)
One problem is that this bedroom is across the hall from the bathroom. This will make the plumbing a little more challenging but still perfectly possible. More on that later.
Now that we've chosen a room, we need to plan out the free range. Ours is L-shaped running the length of two walls. We planned for the drainage to exit the room at the corner of the house, which matched up nicely with the room's closet. Doing this, we will be able to hide the drainage pipe next to the downspout on the outside of the house. The neighbors will never know!
Now we can really start! The first thing to do is prep the room- protecting the walls from the daily mistings. We painted the walls with a high-quality exterior grade paint. While painting, you have a great opportunity to go nuts with decorator techniques and make the walls match the jungle motif you're going for, but the most important thing is to protect the walls. These walls will be subjected to daily rain and round-the-clock high humidity, so choose a quality paint that will stand up to the abuse. If money is no barrier, then by all means tile the walls like a bathroom. If aesthetics are no barrier, you could also install exterior siding on the walls. Bleah.
I do not recommend protecting the walls with flexible plastic, like painter's cloth or pond liner or solid plastics. We tried this and discovered there's no easy way to fasten it to the wall without breaking the seal. (e.g. staples or nails) Eventually, moisture will get behind the plastic and the mold that will grow will cause you no end of trouble.
We went with exterior grade sea foam green paint base, and later during the construction we added a sponge-dabbed darker forest green for a nice jungle-like texture.
We had an ideal situation for the construction: We started building our free range the day after settling on our new house. We still had a month left on the lease of our current home, so the new house was empty and we had plenty of space to work in.
In these photos, the wall standards and gutters are already up. We did it backwards. You should do it forwards. Let's go install the gutters in the next step.
We chose our northeast-facing bedroom, right next to the master bedroom, but across the hall from the bathroom. This bedroom has the most continuous wall space, so we could make a HUGE and spacious free range- but it does go around an angle...complicating design and construction slightly. It receives the most sun and a lot of natural daylight. This is advantageous, because we have found that our chameleons seem to enjoy having a line of sight to a sunny outside. All that sunlight makes it the most naturally warm room in the house, and while it seems like an advantage for a room full of reptiles to be hot, that's not always the case: melleri hail from the mountains, where it's cooler. We will compensate with thermostats to shut off all heating devices when the mercury climbs, and we replaced the bedroom door with a simple screen door to keep air flowing (and the cat out.)
One problem is that this bedroom is across the hall from the bathroom. This will make the plumbing a little more challenging but still perfectly possible. More on that later.
Now that we've chosen a room, we need to plan out the free range. Ours is L-shaped running the length of two walls. We planned for the drainage to exit the room at the corner of the house, which matched up nicely with the room's closet. Doing this, we will be able to hide the drainage pipe next to the downspout on the outside of the house. The neighbors will never know!
Now we can really start! The first thing to do is prep the room- protecting the walls from the daily mistings. We painted the walls with a high-quality exterior grade paint. While painting, you have a great opportunity to go nuts with decorator techniques and make the walls match the jungle motif you're going for, but the most important thing is to protect the walls. These walls will be subjected to daily rain and round-the-clock high humidity, so choose a quality paint that will stand up to the abuse. If money is no barrier, then by all means tile the walls like a bathroom. If aesthetics are no barrier, you could also install exterior siding on the walls. Bleah.
I do not recommend protecting the walls with flexible plastic, like painter's cloth or pond liner or solid plastics. We tried this and discovered there's no easy way to fasten it to the wall without breaking the seal. (e.g. staples or nails) Eventually, moisture will get behind the plastic and the mold that will grow will cause you no end of trouble.
We went with exterior grade sea foam green paint base, and later during the construction we added a sponge-dabbed darker forest green for a nice jungle-like texture.
We had an ideal situation for the construction: We started building our free range the day after settling on our new house. We still had a month left on the lease of our current home, so the new house was empty and we had plenty of space to work in.
In these photos, the wall standards and gutters are already up. We did it backwards. You should do it forwards. Let's go install the gutters in the next step.
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