A rabbit hutch is a lot of things. It’s a home for your furry friends, it’s a financial investment, and it’s part of the overall look of your garden. This makes for plenty of good reasons to keep your hutch in good condition.
Even so, a lot of people are lax about hutch car. This is often because they just don’t really know where to start. Follow these steps for a relatively simple and low-effort, yet highly effective, wood care regime to protect and maintain your rabbit hutch.
Hutch Choice and Setup
Choosing a good-quality hutch made of equally good-quality wood is the first step. The second step is ensuring you set it up properly. Make sure all joints are strong and firm, with pieces of wood up close against each other. Otherwise, water may seep into these gaps. Since protective treatments will likely not be applied to these nooks and crannies, water could potentially find a way into the wood and encourage it to rot. Placing the hutch on slabs or gravel will help keep it in good condition.
Wood Treatment
Even if the wood is pre-treated, this will pale to the protection and preservation offered by a good-quality wood treatment. This will also give you a chance to give your hutch the look and style that you want. For example, Shed & Fence Paint will give you a coloured opaque finish for your rabbit hutch in a range of colours. Tropitech will be a semi-transparent wood finish with amazing longevity. Or Textrol or Textrol HES will provide a saturating wood oil finish to show off the natural beauty of the wood. Whatever finish you choose, though, you will want to favour non-toxic treatments. This in case your rabbits decide to have a nibble!
Long-lasting Protection
The treatments used may be suitable for either, but a rabbit hutch’s needs are different from those of a fence or a shed. In particular, it’s doubtful you’ll want to find somewhere else for your rabbits to live for a few days every single year while they wait for the treatment on their hutch to be properly dry. You will probably want to bear this in mind and apply some kind of particularly long-lasting protection. For example, you will most likely get five or more years out of a good coat of Shed & Fence Paint or Tropitech in a sheltered area before you need to think too much about a fresh treatment, perhaps with some minor maintenance in between if necessary.
Regular Check-Ups
You should regularly inspect your rabbit hutch and check its condition, ideally at least once a year. For the first couple of years, this will probably be little more than developing good habits. Later on, it’s possible that a protective coat will have worn down. This is due to harsh weather or exposure to the sun. The felt on the roof of the hutch might need repairing or renewing, or that a fresh screw might need to be made tight again. Catching these small problems early can prevent big problems later on.
We hope you found this post on how to protect and maintain your rabbit hutch interesting. If you have any other advice or top tips, please feel free to leave them in the comments below. We love hearing from you!
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About Owatrol Team
Our team are ready and willing to support you with your requirements whether it is protecting your newly laid deck or renovating a luxury yacht, whatever the application Owatrol has the solution you are looking for.
I am enquiringly if this product is suitable for new Teak wood
Hi James,
Can you be a little more specific about which product or products you are referring to as several are mentioned in this article. Alternatively, you could give us a call and we can help you with your enquiry.
Many thanks,
The Owatrol Team