If you read my previous build article on my 29 gallon creek tank, you may have noticed I took a shortcut in the aquarium furniture department. I warned against doing so, but I kind of learned the hard way to take my own advice.
No, the fish tank didn’t come crashing down in a tidal wave of broken glass, water and flopping fish. I stand by my assertion that that you could park a car on that thing. No, instead something more unexpected happened.
Yes, that’s my acrobatic manx cat balancing along the edge of the aquarium. Since the desk is bigger than the tank, he was able to hop right up and get an up-close view. A later census of the tank inhabitants confirmed that he had a small snack while he was there as well.
Fortunately, the stars aligned and that same day one of Petco’s 20% off deals landed in my inbox. I got a pretty sweet deal on a simple, but not bad looking metal aquarium stand making it less than $40 shipped.
Putting the stand together was simple. Moving the fish tank to it, not so much.
Here’s another word of sage advice that I actually followed: Always completely empty an aquarium before trying to move it.
So I pulled out all the plants, transferred the fish to a bucket of aquarium water and got the sand out. Don’t forget the substrate, that stuff can be heavy.
That was a pain in the butt, but the biggest problem was the creek chubs kept jumping out of the damn bucket. One of them very nearly met its fishy demise. I found it when I moved the desk out of the way to place the stand. It was barely breathing by the time I got to it.
Fortunately, the fish seems no worse for wear after jumping over the Great Wall and is back to mercilessly harassing its tank mates. That wasn’t even the only jumping incident. Another of them made the leap while I watched. At least after that I got smart enough to cover the bucket.
One re-scape later, and we’re back in business. I need to clean up the wires since they’re visible now, but the setup looks pretty nice. The cat is relegated to watching the action from the safety of the floor.
The moral of the story is do it right the first time or else it’s way more work down the road. Either that or, don’t have an athletic cat.