I just want to say... be careful about bathrooms!
Our old apartment had hard floors, allowing for the use of x-pens, but the new place is on the 2nd floor and it's ALL carpet except kitchen and bathrooms (Layne and Alice are both carpet destroyers). When we first moved in, it took me a couple weeks to figure out what coroplast-floored condos I was building and where, plus gather materials and get them made. Between carpets and cats, the rabbits absolutely can't run around loose here unless someone is keeping an eye on them... so I figured they could live in the bathrooms until they had condos.
In one bathroom, Layne picked a spot and peeled some paint off the wall (naughty boy!) while Nala probably encouraged him, lol. That's our little "lambers" for you, he's always had a thing for drywall.
In the other bathroom...
Early on a Sunday morning, our downstairs neighbors started banging on our door/bedroom window to get our attention. Why? Because there was water coming down their walls in the master bathroom/closet area! Hubby answered the door, started freaking out and woke me up. I scrambled for my glasses and ran to the bathroom... which was FLOODED.
A small geyser of water was spraying up about 5 feet in the air, originating behind the toilet. In the middle of all the chaos was a very shocked, confused and damp little holland lop. Yeah. Genius rabbit had chewed through the line that carries water from the wall/pipes into the toilet tank.
So I dive for the knob that cuts the water supply off at the wall and then scoop up Alice, wrap her in a towel and start drying her off/making sure she wasn't going into shock from getting wet... all the while freaking out that we might get evicted b/c the neighbors called maintenance and I had no way to explain a hole in the water line caused by an animal we weren't supposed to have. Thankfully, they took a while to arrive on a Sunday morning and when I answered the door, I calmly assured them I had gotten the problem fixed (while praying like crazy for no follow-up questions!). Lucky me, he assumed the toilet had overflowed and that's why I had been able to fix the problem myself so quickly... then departed. I told the neighbors the truth about a rabbit causing the incident; fortunately, they didn't rat us out (perhaps because I loaned them our shop-vac and shared the carpet cleaning machine I rented from Home Depot).
The moral of the story is this: if you're going to leave rabbits unsupervised in a bathroom, it's probably a good idea to use NIC grids or something to block access to the back of the toilet.
On a side note, as soon as I was sure that Alice was no worse for wear from her ordeal, husband and I laughed our butts off thinking about the face she must've made when she first broke through the pipe and suddenly got a snout full of water.
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As for the guilt, Happy Bunno, 8 hours of time outside of his cage is quite generous. Yes, it's a small cage... but some things in life are beyond our control - there's only so much you can do when you have to answer to your parents, you know? We've all been there at some point in our lives. The important thing is that you do what you can for him. You give him as much time out of the cage as you can, you love him, you give him attention...
Think about all the rabbits out there in shelters, living in little cages no bigger than 2' x 2', usually with no time out of their cages and rarely any toys. If he didn't have you taking care of him, he might've ended up with far less! I've read enough of your posts in my short time back here on these forums to recognize what a caring and concerned bunny slave you are - please don't beat yourself up about things you can't do anything about!
Edit: oh, and I just noticed your last post:
That sounds good... pretty light on pellets but as long as you feed a variety of greens, then that amount is just fine. Is he eating about his body's volume in hay each day? As long as he's a good hay eater and isn't getting poopy butt or an upset tummy or anything, there's no reason to worry that it's too much veggies (well, the leafy green kinds - non-leafy-greens should be very limited/just as a treat).
