It's very important to have the dragon's environment set up and ready to go before you pick him up. As much as I wanted the little guy right now, I had to get the tank ready first. This turned out to be a bit more work than I expected, and involved various minor personal injuries.
Getting the tank and accessories was easy. I got a large tank (four feet across), which sits on its own stand. It's less a tank and more a piece of furniture, really. Before setting up the tank, I decided to put six castors on the bottom of the stand so I could move it around without having to lift it.
There are all kinds of substrates you can use for a bearded dragon (gravel, wood chips, etc). You can find bags of these various substrates in pet shops and they all seem rather expensive for what you get. You can even get "Vita-Sand" which is a calcium carbonate substrate fortified with vitamins. I'm against using Vita-Sand because it's even more expensive and it makes your tank smell like Flintstone chewable vitamins. As well, while the lizard may inadvertently eat some sand from time to time, I doubt he's going to get any real benefit over and above that provided by his veggies, fruit, and dusted, gut-loaded crickets. We're talking grains of sand here, compared to crickets so laden with vitamin dust inside and out that they have difficulty moving about. Anyway, I chose to use plain coarse sand.
Right, then. The sand. The pet shop was out of sand. All the guy had was a big styrofoam container full of coarse black sand. While I thought black sand would look pretty cool, there was a slight catch: the sand was extracted from an aquarium the night before. It was completely waterlogged and smelled like fish. He gave it to me for free, which I thought was a pretty good deal at the time. All I had to do was dry it out somehow.
When I got the sand home, I set the styrofoam container (which easily weighed a hundred pounds) on my counter, with one end over the sink. I tipped up the other end and stuck various household items underneath to prop it up. I then took a small screwdriver and poked some holes in the bottom of the container on the end over the sink, and water started draining out. A lot of water.
Once most of the excess water was drained, I still had waterlogged sand that smelled like fish. After trying various drying methods (such as soaking small handfuls between two paper towels and then sitting it under the halogen lamp on my desk for half an hour), I discovered my only practical solution.
I got out a cookie sheet, shoveled sand onto it and spread it out evenly across the entire sheet, about half an inch thick. Then I threw it in the oven at 450 degrees. At first, steam started coming off the sand. When the steam went away, however, the sand was not yet dry. I could still see grains of sand moving slightly as steam from further down pushed them out of the way. When the sand was utterly motionless, it was dry. And very, very hot. Probably germ-free as well. I ran a fork through the sand to make sure there were no remaining pockets of moisture before taking it out of the oven.
The next step was to take the sand out of the oven and pour it into another tray near an open window to cool. Once cooled, it was not only ready to go into the tank, but it was completely odourless. I collected the processed sand in a clean plastic pail (it's easier to pour the sand into the tank from a pail than from a big cookie sheet).
It took four hours to bake all the sand dry, one cookie sheet at a time. Each successive sheet full of sand took longer to dry than the previous one, since the sand at the bottom of the styrofoam container had significantly more water in it. During this procedure, I burned my hands three times and got sand all over my kitchen counter, sink, and floor.
Nothing is free.