Hey guys, we're in Seattle, Washington and we're going to do a tour of Russ's
gypsy wagon. Let's go check it out.
Hello. Come on in. I'm good.
How did you get into building something like this? It started with a,
when I moved to family property Skyo.
I was going to live in a family owned cabin, but we needed some overflow space.
And so I was thumbing around the internet and saw, um,
I was interested in doing some woodworking and at the port towns in the school
of woodworking, they have a little button called gypsy wagons.
I had no idea what a gypsy wagon was,
so I went up and took one of their classes.
So what elements of a house do you actually have in here? Well, there's the bed.
soon to be two single beds. Um, there's a sink, um, closet,
just a drawers. There is no bathroom, no toilet cooking is outside.
It's a bedroom on wheels.
That's what I think of it as. Pretty cool bedroom. Or a hard top tent,
a bitch'n tent.
So it's about 10 feet long by, let's call it six feet wide.
An average of six feet wide. So, um, 60 square feet. Yeah.
But the floor is not anywhere near that because this inside dimension is a
little over four feet. And this is a little, almost seven. So the,
the actual floor space is maybe 30 square feet. It's really little.
So the idea is that it comes up 18 inches vertically and then it goes
horizontally and then the angle walls go out from there with the curved roof.
And this, this 18 inches is a really comfortable height for sitting down on.
Yeah. And um, uh, it's also, you know, width wise, it's,
it's a really comfortable seat with the angle back chairs have angled backs,
right? And so it's really a comfortable seating seating arrangement. Um,
some people look at this and think, well what's behind here?
Isn't there storage in there? And well there's not, cause that's,
that's an outside wall, right. So,
but that's just the design of a ledge style gypsy wagon. Originally
I designed this space to fit a double bed and I realized that it just wasn't
gonna work very well because the person back there is going to have to crawl
over the person back here.
And I'm 62 I have to get up in the middle of the night
and my girlfriend doesn't like that very much.
So we realized that she came up with this idea of having the bed,
um, the beds L-shaped and so it,
the whole thing is a work in progress. So eventually I'm going to have a bed,
uh, some slide out mechanism here to um, uh,
have another single bed this way. Yeah. So single bed,
single bed slide in table table hinges up.
Yeah. Okay. So that's like a dining area or a desk. Yeah,
that's the bedroom dining area. Reading area. This is that. All of it. Well,
let's talk about what's this here? This is just a closet. Um,
cool thing is, Oh, I've wondered where those shirts went. Um,
light comes on when you, when you open it and turn it off. When you close it.
You got Cedar. It's Tennessee red Cedar. Yeah.
Aromatic Cedar. Smells nice in there. It does, doesn't it?
That's really neat wood.
And the cool thing is you don't have to finish it cause you don't,
you don't want to. So Chester doors, little countertop on top,
a bullet type 12 volt plug in and then a USB plugins.
We have to talk about the sink over here.
Well it's made out of Western red Cedar.
One of the unfinished details is I still don't have a backsplash for it,
but that's, you know. Yeah.
And so there's a switch to turn on that pump.
And that's a demand pump that viewers are frequently aware are know very
well. And so it's cold water. There's no hot water system,
so nothing happens when the hot water turns on. Um,
but I figured why not put a wood sink in it? It's lightweight. It's Cedar,
Western red Cedar, which is really light wood.
And I couldn't find one that was the right size that I liked and I thought,
I'm just gonna make one and it works fine.
And attaching the hardware for the drain system is no big deal.
You just have to carve the pole. It's the correct size,
which is an inch and three quarters.
There's a curve there that matches the metal and the drain
and you're good to go.
And the cool thing is you don't have to put a trap in it cause it's,
it's not connected to a sewer. So it just goes into that. Um,
there's, there's no key trap not required.
And you can see that the, there's a uh, water supply valve. Yeah.
Where, where is your a water tank?
Water tank is underneath here under the bed.
It's kinda hidden away and not too easy to get to.
These are some interesting fixtures that you have here.
Did you make these? People think it's a shower.
Showers you with lights. I like this. I,
this light is really cool. I like it. Yeah.
And then this space here is this a piece of wood? Yeah, yeah
Really cool. See the little things are,
what matter are these speakers you have? Yeah, it's got a deck in it.
Just a car deck and all. It's all 12 volts system.
Well,
so you can really jam out here. Rock and roll, man. Not bad.
These are really unique windows. Did you build them yourself?
Yeah. Wow. And you ordered the glass and put it together.
And what about the stained glass?
Cause you have a couple of stained glass windows. It's actually not stain glass.
No. Um, it's called stained glass overlay. Oh, okay.
The reason I did that is because I wanted a tempered glass and you can't do,
um, tempered glass with stained glass. Yeah.
And when you're going down the road, tempered glass is important. Yeah,
I think so. I don't worry about these, this glass, you know, it's pretty tough.
Okay. Well I want to talk to you a little bit about this door.
Did you build it yourself? Yeah, I made it myself. I did do every,
I even made the cushions in there.
And so that is part of your three headed monster. It's called a,
forgive my pronunciation. I learned it as a teetu
And that's a mythical creature.
one of the tribes up in British Columbia,
so it has a central head and two serpents on the,
on the outside.
And apparently if you see one you're dead at the same time.
They often protect, um, openings to long houses. Okay.
And so I thought,
I think that'd be really cool to use it as the angle braces for the roof
overhang. And I thought, well I can do that carving. You know,
that just involves carving, you know, one face. And then I realized, no,
wait a minute, I got a carve. Each one has two sides. So I got a carve both sides.
And so I had this one dimension or yeah, there's two dimensional rendition.
I had to make it kind of three dimensional. And so I cut,
I'd carve this one first and um,
got kind of bored and decided that with this one I make the nose different from,
if you look at it from the side, it's the same,
but you look at an end on this nose is split and this tongue is split and that
tongue isn't, and that tongue, that nose isn't split.
And so I just changed it up a little bit.
How long did it take you to carve one of those? I don't know how many,
I probably have 200 hours in those things. Is it hand carving? Yeah,
just carved it by hand. It's Alaska yellow Cedar.
I bought special piece of wood for it and I had to do it pretty early on in the
process because they had to be attached to the building before I could finish
the roof.
It weighs 3000 pounds total, including the trailer.
It's a single 3,500 pound axle. Yup.
And the payload of the trailer is 3000 pounds.
So I'm a good 500 pounds under what,
what I could could legally haul. Right. And where did you get this trailer?
Um, some trailer joint in the Chehalis area.
I didn't know what I was doing. I just need a flatbed trailer and that's,
that's what I wound up with. So this side is really cool.
It's recycled a CVG Cedar, it's probably 70 years old.
And it came off a building at our timber farm at Skile and, um,
it was a five quarter thick CVG Cedar is about eight inches wide.
And I, um, uh, remodeled it and made, um,
about five sixteenths, thick tongue and groove siding. It's beautiful,
really lightweight then it's really lightweight. Yeah. Well,
thank you so much for taking us through your gypsy wagon.
We really appreciate it. That's my, I'm delighted. Thank you.
All right guys. See you next time.