Your home probably has its own look and doesn't look like your friend's house or your neighbor's house. Your home is decorated in a way that's special and unique. You can make your gerbils' homes just as personalized. There's no reason your gerbils' homes need to look like every other gerbil's home. In this tip, we'll offer some suggestions for one way that you can make your gerbils' tank special.

Hope feels at home in her personalized gerbil tank.Be Creative
The only limits to how you personalize your gerbils' tank are your creativity and your gerbils' safety. First, make sure that you don't put any items inside the tank that are not safe for your gerbils. Some unsafe items include ropes, cotton balls, and plastic. These can hurt your gerbils, so stay away from them and instead use items such as cardboard and unfinished wooden objects.

We wanted to give Hope a tank that really looked like a home. To create a special tank for Hope, we bought some dollhouse wallpaper at the local craft store. We cut it to the same size as the backside of her tank. We also visited the scrapbooking aisle of the craft store and found several stickers and scrapbook page decorations that we could use for Hope's tank. For example, we found one scrapbook item that was shaped like a floor lamp, one that was a flat vase of flowers made from pieces of felt, and another that was shaped like a cute little red chair.

Hope is surrounded by photos of friends and family. In the scrapbooking aisle, we also found several stickers shaped like picture frames. These were perfect, because we wanted Hope to have photos of her friends and family hanging on the walls.

You can see in the photos of Hope's tank that she has three framed photos hanging on her wall. The first is a picture of me and Hope together. The second is a picture of Hope's aunts Audrey and Ramona. And the third is a photo of Hope with her sister Faith.

Hope's window reveals a view of the desert. A Tank With A View
We also bought a small wooden window for a dollhouse so that we could place a window on Hope's wall. It was important that Hope have a nice view of the desert from her window, so we cut out a photo of a desert scene and taped it to the back of the dollhouse window.

One of our favorite parts of Hope's newly redecorated home is the white picket fence that runs along the front of the tank. Again, we found this little fence in the scrapbooking section of the craft store.

A white picket fence runs along the front of Hope's tank.What's great about decorating your gerbils' tank this way is that you don't have to worry about the decorations harming your gerbils, because the decorations are on the outside of the tank. We glued or taped all of the photos, the floor lamp, the window, etc. to the dollhouse wallpaper, and then we used tape to hang it on the outside of the back of the tank. The little white picket fence is attached to the front of the tank with double-sided scrapbooking tape. (This tape is easy to remove later.)

Other Ideas
You can try all types of different ways to personalize your gerbils' tank. For example, instead of using dollhouse wallpaper and scrapbook decorations, you could use a drawing or painting that you made as the background for the tank. You could also use a favorite poster. If you want your gerbils' home to look like the desert (where gerbils come from), you can look for aquarium background sheets. You may find the ones with desert scenes with the background sheets for fish tanks, or you might find them in the reptile aisle of the pet shop.

Use your imagination when you create a background for your gerbils' tank. You might add photos of your gerbils to the background, or you could add photos of you or your family to the background. Have fun decorating!

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Do your gerbils have a fun, interesting tank? If so, we'd love to see a photo of how you set up your gerbils' tank! Feel free to email us and show us or tell us about your gerbils' home!