Sawed-off yellow, blue and green wine bottle bottoms make for a colorful lower-level window in the guest area, and there is a heating unit with an exterior vent built from a frying-pan base, with a broken brass cymbal that serves as a heat reflector. (Vegetable oil is the suggested fuel.) The most expensive items were the four sheets of corrugated plastic on the roof, which came to $80.

What did Mr. Diedricksen envision the Gypsy Junker as being?

“Originally, it was going to be a place to brainstorm for my book and my designs,” he says. “There’s no better place than inside someplace that is unconventional and bizarre. It helps you think outside the box instead of sitting in some white-walled room. And my son’s first camp-out was here.”

Heartwarming, though since Mr. Diedricksen has not offered to demonstrate his heating system, it is not heating any other part of the reporter, so we move briskly on to the next structure.

The Hickshaw is considerably shorter and smaller, with a slanting roof between 3 feet and 4 feet 10 inches tall, a width of about 30 inches and a length of 7 feet. Scrunched inside with Mr. Diedricksen, the reporter finds she cannot move her elbows more than a few inches from her body.

“The Hickshaw was the first one I built,” Mr. Diedricksen says. “I built it thinking it might be a place for people to stay who were drunk or annoying, so I didn’t want them staying in the Vermont cabin with me. I had envisioned all these microstructures as places to sleep for the people who say, ‘Oh, I forgot my sleeping bag.’ Almost like the Ewok village, all these little micro-shelters dotting my land. Or you could use it as a greenhouse. At one point, I was going to caulk it up real good and use it as a hot-rock sauna because of the cedar flooring and because it is so small it would be easy to heat. Or for music festivals, where people bring these wacky small structures. You have to put it on a trailer. It doesn’t have road legs.”

Do any of the windows open?

“No, these don’t,” he says.

It could be very nice in the spring, the reporter notes, but in the summer you’d bake like a brisket.

“Oh, yeah,” Mr. Diedricksen concedes. “It’s meant as secure sleeping place, a micro mobile shelter. For festivals, it’s a single sleeper: a tent alternative, but one that is not going to tear as easily and offers a little more security.”