Homemade RVs in Washington State

Tiny house living involves some legal gray areas, some of which can be resolved by getting the house legally designated and registered as a recreational vehicle (RV). Unfortunately, this is usually only possible if the house was built by a certified RV manufacturer, like Tumbleweed Tiny Homes or another tiny house building company--not if it was homemade. But at the Portland Alternative Dwellings workshop last month, I learned that in Oregon--and, we were told, only in Oregon--you can have someone from the DMV come out, inspect your homemade tiny house, and certify it as an RV. Cool! But... only in Oregon. Bummer.

However...!

Today I'm preparing to get my trailer registered, and in the process of looking up the local vehicle licensing office address, I fell down a rabbit hole and discovered that Washington State has provisions for "homemade camp trailers," too. According to the Washington State Patrol:

SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING HOMEMADE CAMP TRAILERS:

RCW 43.22.350: If you build a camp trailer and want to license it as a Recreational Vehicle (RV) camp trailer, at the time of inspection you must present a completed Labor & Industries (L&I) RV inspection with the L&I inspection insignia applied to your camp trailer. Please contact your local L&I office for information on their inspection process. In addition to the L&I inspection, you must also present valid release documents for the trailer and/or parts used. 

I'm not exactly sure what this means (what is a Labor & Industries RV inspection? What requirements do you have to meet? Who does the inspection?), but it indicates that there might exist a route for homemade tiny houses to get the official RV designation in Washington State. If, down the line, I decide that my tiny house needs to be a legal RV--not just a load on a trailer--then it could be a possibility.

Woohoo!

Oh, and I also learned (or re-learned after having forgotten?) that Washington is one of the states where the maximum vehicle height is 14', not 13'6"--the maximum height most commonly cited by tiny housers. I had been a little worried about coming too close to that 13'6" limit, with a 2' high trailer bed, an 11' side wall, and 2x6 rafters... but now I'm not so worried.

Yay!

 P.S.:  This weekend my family went to the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest to get our Christmas tree. We almost always get our Christmas tree from a tree farm in Skagit Valley--run by a retired school teacher who looks just like a particularly well-groomed Santa Claus--so this was something different. And it snowed!

(I didn't have any fun, optimistic photos that related to the main subject of this post, so the Christmas tree expedition will have to do.)