Transient Loses His 2-Story Handmade Home : Thousand Oaks: One-ton structure, outfitted with refrigerators and a TV, draws some admiration for builder’s ingenuity, but is towed away for code violations.

As onlookers winced, the two-story house on wheels that transient David M. Russell had hewn out of scrap wood tilted crazily before thumping onto a trailer to be hauled to a Thousand Oaks storage yard.

“The whole thing gets down to legislating and micro-managing others’ lives,” said the former UCLA dental student as his makeshift home was hauled away by city workers Wednesday morning.

Russell, now homeless for the second time in 18 months, had lived secretly in a three-room attic apartment in a nearby office building for three years before being evicted in 1993.

And Wednesday, resilient to the end, the 41-year-old man busied himself with weatherproofing the one-ton structure even as a city crew prepared to take it away from him.

“I just can’t stand it,” said Diane Bennett, who watched as the iron forks of a five-ton front loader gingerly angled Russell’s handiwork toward the trailer. “I’ve watched him build it and have become very attached to it.”

Until last week, the 15-foot-high patchwork of wood and ingenuity had been taking shape under a palm in a parking lot behind a technology firm.

But workers rolled it off company property and to the curb of a street after being told that the ramshackle shelter--fitted with two small refrigerators, a television and two microwave ovens--violated building codes.

Concerned that it posed a traffic hazard on the street, city officials made good on their threats and hauled the ungainly structure to an impound lot, leaving Russell to face winter without a home.

“It’s a no-win situation for us,” Public Works Supt. Mel Henson said.

Russell was alternately impassive and flustered by his sudden change of fortune.

“It’s a damning system,” he said, “you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.” The structure, which began in March as a one-man lean-to and grew as Russell wheeled it from business park to business park, is as much a testament to unfettered dreams as a casualty of nonconformity.

“I just can’t understand why he wants to live like that,” said his mother, 68-year-old Eleanor Russell of Seal Beach. “He doesn’t want to take orders. He wants to be his own man, his own boss. . . . But you can’t always do that.”

Though born of need, Russell’s jumble of trash bin scraps soon became in his mind a prototype of a cabin in a schooner or a houseboat that could be produced on a mass scale. Then it was hauled off, recoverable only if Russell can find $800 in impound fees.

“I’ll get on,” he said as he gathered four shopping carts full of possessions. “I’ll just go back to where I was before, with nothing, except whatever skills I’ve picked up.”

His skills are considerable, according to several observers. “He’s obviously a talented carpenter,” said Deputy City Atty. Jim Friedl. “I can’t see why he’s not doing this for somebody, holding down a job.”

Russell, asked by an admiring observer why he did not ply his skills on the job market, nodded toward his two-story creation. “This is my job,” he said.