Guinea pigs are swell, as long as you know all the “gotchas” going in (and you certainly sound like you do. I, however, did not).
We started with 1 male, and he was lonely and sad. We got a 2nd male, and the first was instantly more lively.
That 4’x2’ (more or less) cage is at the small end of being enough space for two. Space is one of the “gotchas”, because I thought one could live in a large aquarium, and I was mistaken.
We have a cage that is a “tray” made from a piece of corrugated plastic cut and taped into shape that is about 45"x30" and has a half-width second floor (so it’s 45"x15"). The walls are the metal grid “crates” that are recommended by people at GunieaLynx and the like. I took some scrap carpet and nailed it to some scrap wood bracketed into an “L” shape to use as a ramp between the floors. I was worried they wouldn’t use it if it was too steep, so the rise/run is about 1:3 (8" up over 24") to the 90 degree left turn, then a little steeper than that, maybe 1:2 (6" up over 12") to the second floor. They took to the ramp instantly, for what it’s worth.
I really think that any flooring that has holes big enough for their poop pellets to fall through will have holes big enough that they’ll injure their feet/ankles. Since I got the pig for my (then 12 year old) daughter, I was paranoid about anything that might hurt/kill them and traumatize her. The metal “grating” was viewed negatively by people at GuineaLynx and the like, so I just steered clear.
We started with wood chips, but quickly got tired of having to clean parts of it every day or so. So, we switched to putting towels down, and then polar fleece on top of the towels. The pee is easily wicked through the fleece to the towels, and we change the fleece layer twice a week, cycling the towels out every other fleece change. Being able to just fold/roll up the fleece, take it outside, and shake all the poop off is MUCH better than scooping out sections of litter, IMO. I also think it’s cheaper, but I haven’t really put thought into what the true cost of my method it (energy, soap, water used to run the fleece and towels through the wash). We have been using the same set of towels/fleece (4 bath towels, using 2 at a time and 4 pieces of fleece cut to size, using 1 at a time) for about 18 months now, and there’s no indication we’ll need to replace anything soon.
I made another smaller tray from some leftover corrugated plastic, and got the large
Timber Hide-a-Way to sit in the tray. We put recycled paper “litter” (Yesterday’s News or the like) in the thing for them to use as a potty-house. They still pee other places and poop everywhere, but the pee is much less of a problem than before we had the house (when they would pee in every possible nook/corner).
Plenty of owners will say they’ve managed to potty train their pigs so they only pee in a specific part of the cage, or they can be left to roam a large area and will only pee in a litter tray or something. I’m dubious, but I’m also too lazy to earnestly try to litter train them.
As long as we don’t get lazy and miss a fleece/towel change, the smell doesn’t get bad. Although we do sprinkle some baking powder on the bottom of the tray before we put clean towels down each week to help.
On weekends sometimes, we’ll put them in the guest bathroom (on a huge piece of scrap fabric the wife had) so they have a bigger area to run around in. In the summer, we have a second cage (just the grid walls, no bottom) that we put outside so they can just roam around in it and eat grass/weeds at whim.
They’re pretty cool.
