But I did just save loads of mony on my Car Insurance by switching to Geico!

We're in the process of getting the barn set up, so we've been haunting the local home improvement stores looking for ideas about how to do it cheaply. We're taking a bunch of basic cages and turning them into "hangers" by (you guessed it) hanging them from the ceiling of the barn. We're doing this because it's cheap and easy, and it also makes cleaning a lot more convenient. However, we didn't have a chance to actually go ahead and price the initial hanging scheme that we had devised.

Let me describe the initial plan: hang the cages from the barn rafters with a loop of chain attached to each corner of the cages, and then repeat this downward for each additional level below that.
For our set up, with 8 cages, that's 20 connection points per level. For the top level, it is attached directly to the rafters, and each subsequent level is tied to it by about 4 inches of chain, with a connector on the top and the bottom.

So, for our two rows of cages that's: (20 * (.47 * 3) + (2 * 20 * 1.8) + 2 * (20 * .47 * .3) + (2 * 2 * 20 * 1.8) = $28.20 + $72 + $5.64 + $144 = $249.84

And that's just for the damn hanging part.

Now, since one of the nice folks in the hardware department there
pointed out that we could use "uncoated steel utility wire" instead of all those damn connectors, we could cut out all of the new connectors except for those needed to hang from the ceiling (all 20 of them).

That comes out to: (20 * (.47 *3)) + (2 * 20 * 1.8) + 2 * 20 * (.3 * 20 * 2 * (4 / 110)) = $28.20 + $72 + $17.46 = $117.66

Now, that's a lot of savings, so I was a little bit skeptical at first that it could be so easy.

I decided to do an experiment to test the tensile strength of the wire. I tied the wire in a simple loop around the wooden handle of a gardening tool, and I tied the other end in the same way around a piece of scrap wood we had lying around. To conduct the tensile strength test, I sat in a chair, with the scrap wood braced against the floor by my feet (standing on it) and the garden tool in my hands; I then pulled on the wire as hard as I could.

The result: the wire did not snap, though it did embed one end about a 1/4 inch deep into the scrap wood. That was enough for me.