This table was a replacement for our first Tortoise Table. A new table became necessary when our three juvenile sulcata got too large to comfortably move around on their old table. This table is much different from our previous tortoise table, for two main reasons:
- It's larger, with nearly 25 square feet of room. Our first table was originally designed for two smaller tortoises. When we adopted our third sulcata, Willie, it became obvious that we needed a larger table.
- We also needed to move the tortoise table to a different room in our house. Because of the existing layout of that room, the two tables had to be located at different heights above the floor, and so we had to build a small bridge to connect them.
The floor of this table is made from 3/4-inch plywood. The walls are a framework of 1 X 10 boards that have been joined together with wood screws and then attached to the plywood floor using longer wood screws. Unlike our last table, we made the walls solid this time, except for a small "port-hole" of plexiglass so that we can see from the room doorway if the tortoises are basking and ready to be taken outside.
The ceramic tiles shown in the drawing are placed in the corners of the table because that is where our tortoises tend to dig, and the tile keeps them from scarring the wood floor of the table. The tiles also help hold down the newspaper we use as a liner over the table's wood floor.
We use a mixture of dampened Bed-A-Beast®, organic topsoil, and grass hay as our table substrate. The tortoises seem to like this because they can dig into it and fluff it up for burrowing. Since we live in the desert southwest with relatively low humidity, we dampen the substrate twice a week with water to mimic the higher humidity levels found in tortoise burrows in the wild.
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 Mixing the substrate for the table: we use organic topsoil and chopped-up grass hay |
 It takes three to five 5-gallon buckets of substrate to adequately cover the table |
 The substrate is spread around the table, and the tortoises rearrange it to suit themselves |
We hope this information will inspire you to build your own tortoise table!