I'm Linda. This is my husband Brendan and this is the Gypsy Wagon.
I think kinda the biggest inspiration for most of our projects have been travel.
When we were first married, after our honeymoon, we lived on a boat. A 28 foot boat, right?
Yeah 20 foot Erickson. We didn't know how to sail when we first got the boat so it
was a lot of like ah steep learning curve, yeah. We just loved the idea of being able to live tiny
and have everything that we needed with us and so we wanted to give that
experience to other people as well. Being that we do vacation rentals we figured
"let's do a tiny house." And my grandpa growing up lived very much like a
gypsy and so that was kind of part of the inspiration.
This is our Gypsy Wagon.
Starting out we have our solar array because it's
completely off grid. We have nine panels at 300 watts each so we have 2700 watts
feeding our battery bank. We have eight batteries making about 1700 amps of
power and then we have propane. Propane feeds our stove and our fridge and a
heater inside and a little backup generator
just in case solar's not giving us enough power as well. Behind our solar we
have kind of our little awning back here. Nice gypsy inspired awning. We try to
capture our gray water and eventually going to be growing some sort of garden
out here for some fresh fruits and veggies and that sort of stuff. But out here
we have our kind of gypsy inspired siding. Those two kind of shutter things
came from our last house as well. Underneath in the front here we have two
tanks. We have a 75 gallon tank for our freshwater coming in and then we have
another 75 gallons for gray water capturing the sink and the shower. Just
behind the axles is a battery bank with our eight batteries about a
thousand pounds of batteries all kind of tucked underneath our custom-built
trailer, where the gypsy wagon sits. As it is Airbnb we try to do everything as
remotely as possible so we have our remote keypad too that they can come in
and no keys exchange and that sort of stuff.
Welcome to the inside of the Gypsy House. Here this is our couch and the couch
actually turns into a queen-size bed so you can pull that out and then when that's in use
we have the other door which is cool so you can still go in and out. Inside
we have this heater. When my husband and I lived on a boat we really liked
this heater so we figured we'd try it in the gypsy wagon. Do you want to come upstairs
with me?
So this is the loft. This is the other bed so you can fit about four people in
here. It's quite large this way. You've got a little bit of headroom here but
not too much. In the summer you can open up the skylights and it gives a really
good breeze at night especially when you're sleeping. And we tried doing it
not right at our heads so that when you wake up you're not in all of the light
right in your eyes. We've got this table over here which Brendan made and he made
it so you can just pull it on the sides and it goes down really pretty easily so
you can kind of have more space to dance or whatever you want to do. Then we have
our kitchen with the idea of gypsy in mind. We wanted to bring that feel into the
kitchen as well so we used a desk for the main part of the cabinet here and
then just painted over the desk with like a white kind of vintage look to it.
Then we've got some really fun little details like engravings here and kind of
all throughout the Gypsy Wagon. If you look close enough there's some really fun
stuff. The closet kind of just has all of the utilities so it's got the water
heater, the controlling system to the solar, all of that stuff. So this barn
door my cousin actually made. A lot of the things that we did in here because
it's a tiny house you have to think of everything thinner or shorter so he did
a pretty thin art door here and then we come into the bathroom. This is our
compost toilet that we have here. Surprisingly there is no smell which is
beyond me how it works, but I'm loving it. On this side we have a shower. We've
kind of created this wall to it which is kind of hard to come up with but the
guys that were helping us were really good at doing it. So what we did was we
had this piece of metal kind of like those sheets of metal that you get at
Home Depot but they were holey so what they did was actually they put caulking
and they spread the caulking all the way down and then on top of that they put
like a polyurethane on top of it to seal it and then Brendan made the sink
and we added more of the copper elements into the sink.
When we were in college we kind of did our first big trip. We did like the
college Europe trip and then on our honeymoon we did kind of like a year
long just traveling the world and that really opened our eyes just to so much.
Just living cheaply out of a backpack and going from place to place. If we liked
it we'd stay there for a long time and just kind of simplify life a bit.
It was nice, yeah. Vietnam this year with our son, he's
two and a half. It was phenomenal. It was so much fun seeing it through his eyes and we have
another another one on the way so it'll be kind of fun to travel with two next year.
It's very rewarding to see it kind of through their eyes and I guess one
little tip that came from my cousin who travels quite a bit for work is for the
plane rides because it could be very scary and intimidating at first as a new
parent understanding other parents have gone through it too. You're not out there by
yourself and everyone's looking at you when your baby cries. People know that babies
cry and they know they're going to be on a plane with a baby crying, probably, but
having a gift, even a small gift wrapped up, something kind of hold over
their head and look you have a gift coming up and something they can look
forward to and then keeps them occupied for maybe 10-15 minutes and then kind
of spread those out a little bit. It's kind of a fun little thing for them to
get into. We had like three or four gifts wrapped up and he was stoked.
Something just kind of fun. A big one for us when we're traveling with kids is keep
everything that you have like in a minimal so instead of bringing
like a very big diaper bag kids could really live off very little. They're
happy with what's around them and they can pick up a stick and make that a toy
and they're pretty into it so keeping it minimal kind of allows us to not have to
think of all of the things that we need to provide. Diapers, food, and water.
Really that's, yeah.
Thanks for watching this week's video. If you enjoyed it be sure to give it a thumbs
up. If you're new to the channel be sure to subscribe. For all of you that are asking
about my van I will be posting a video on my van whenever we hit 100,000
subscribers so share this video with a friend or just share the channel with a
friend and help us get there and you'll get to see my van but until then if you want to
see more stuff about my van and my life go follow me on Instagram and Twitter.
But until next time stay rad! Dylan out...can you still see me?