In January 2011 my husband and I designed a terrarium in a 25 gallon tank. I painted a faux stained glass mural with special plastic lead and translucent glass paint on the outside of the tank. We built a clear acrylic planter with a pass through for water circulation and covered the pump with a hand sculpted and water safe painted rock formation made of styrofoam. The bottom section was for fish and two red bellied newts, who would presumably also venture onto the land. The newts had the best story, because they would somehow escape the enclosure and roam the house. We are pretty sure a cat found one, but the other crawled onto my husband’s foot one morning startling him and sending the newt flying. Newt-imer survived the flight and my husband returned him to his enclosure where he lived until 2015. We had to re-home him after a house fire when we all had to find new accommodations for a while.

While the designing process was interesting, and there were lessons learned, the cleaning and maintaining of a fish tank is not something either of us want to bother with again.