A rabbit's cage/corrugated pen/dog-crate-turned-pen is her castle. Intrude not when the princess is at home and relaxing!!

Every house rabbit should have his or her own home.   Even if you let your rabbit run free in your home during the day, it's probably a good idea to put him or her in a cage at night.  It's for their own protection ... you know, just in case of earthquakes that cause things to fall down on the floor (you wouldn't want a book or flower pot to crash down on my head), or tornadoes or hurricanes (you can grab my cage fast and get down to the storm cellar), or power outages (you won't be stumbling around in the dark stepping on your fluffy little pet).

It's really, really important that the cage you pick out has plenty of room for your bunny to stretch out and get comfortable or move around to eat and drink and go potty.  We're pretty clean animals, so our cages should be big enough to have one side where we can go potty and another side where our food and water is.  You wouldn't want a toilet in your kitchen, would you?  We don't like it either.  Give me land, lots of land ... Ahem.  You catch my drift.

Necessary cage furnishings are a food bowl and water bowl or bottle.  Extra things are small toys and a hay container that hangs from the top where I can get the hay whenever I want some but the bottom of the cage stays clean.  If the cage you buy has a wire bottom, you might also want to consider putting a small piece of carpet, an old towel, or a small blanket on the bottom to protect my little paws.* If your bunny chews the towel or carpet, remove it immediately and use newspaper or paper towels. The strings from carpeting and towels can get stuck in my insides and cause problems, but paper towels and newspaper are wood products that I can chew without causing any problems.   Of course, if you're a white rabbit like me, forget the newspaper.  My mom tried it once, and my beautiful white fur became dirty newsprint black!  That took a lot of extra bathing on my part to clean up!!

Whether it's a cage or a pen, ours is strictly an open door policy.
(With Marshie's pen, it later became a "no door" policy when the entire side was cut away.)

When I, Marshmallow Cream Puff, lived with my foster mom before being adopted, I stayed during the days in a pen, the normal wire kind you can find in pet stores; so my new permanent human mom wanted to give me the same kind of housing that I was used to when she brought me home after being adopted.  (She wanted me to be comfortable and not scared in a new place that was unfamiliar to me.)   Since she didn't have much money right at the time to buy a pen from a pet store, she created a pen for me out of empty corrugated boxes that she'd found discarded at her work place.  Two of them taped together after cutting out one of the big sides from each box made the perfect size for little ole me.

(*Note: If using a wire-bottomed cage, it is especially important to keep an eye on the bottoms of our paws.  If any sores or unusual cuts appear, have them checked immediately by a veterinarian, and then seriously consider another form of housing for your bunny.  I, Wascal Bunny, never had that problem while living in a wire-bottomed cage.  I must have come from pretty hardy stock.  But that doesn't mean that other bunnies don't have softer paws than mine, so don't torture them with sore feet if they have a problem with the wire bottoms.)

A picture from Wascal's photo album