Outhouse Out Takes

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Life is funny isn’t it? One minute you’re minding your own business (literally we own our own business and it takes a fair amount of minding) and the next minute the department of public health is threatening you with a $1000 fine.

Nope. It has nothing to do with raw milk, sales are going great and still no rules passed,YEAH!, this piece of paper was related  to a gift we received last Christmas from our oldest son. Some of you might recall this awesome outhouse…

Built by hand in his own garage; he even wrapped it in Christmas paper. A stunning gift and we were thrilled. Perfect for our new simpler life we are still striving towards. Then this past May all three of my strong sons and my hubby dug a nice deep hole for it. I was so proud. So proud that I, you guessed it, blogged about it. You can see that original post HERE. Silly me thinking Freedom of Speech was alive and well in the US.

What I did not know though, although I had suspected it; our government officials, rather than doing the work in their job descriptions, were spending a good amount of their paid-by-our-taxes salaried time, reading my blog. Since they still have no basis to give us any trouble regarding raw milk sales, they instead went after a defenseless rectangular box.

Their claim? We did follow all the Illinois State Laws surrounding the building of simple, single seater outhouse; excuse me, I mean “Private Sewage Disposal System.” Attached to this letter was a five page permit application, requiring a $100 Permit Fee and three pages of “Administrative Code” regarding human waste disposal which had to be met. You might thinking, big deal, pay the $100 and use your outhouse. Sadly, not so simple.

One of the requirements states that’s the bottom of the privy hole must be at least four feet above the water level. One of the ISCA Certified Professional Soil Classifiers we contacted said that is virtually impossible to do in our county as our water level is very high and thus the only way we could meet the standards would be to purchase a septic tank, pay to have it properly installed and then place the outhouse over THAT!

Now here’s where it gets funny. Wasn’t that the whole reason for installing an outhouse? In order to avoid all that? So faced with the choices of spending thousands of dollars to continue “simplifying” our lives for the privilege of using our outhouse on our property say 3-4 times a month (since we still don’t live there) or leaving it as is, paying the $1000 fine and probably many more fines to come, we decided to fill in the stupid hole because God knows how our little bit of “sewage” would certainly threaten an entire counties water supply. Never mind the tons of chemicals being dumped on the fields that surround this property on four sides, the massive amounts of runoff with each rain into the ditches and onto our non-contaminated farm, the drift of hazardous chemicals that float and drop down from above us by planes spraying additional herbicides and fungicides, because that you see…is legal.

So IDPH, here you go. Proof  that our outhouse is no longer a dangerous threat to our friends, neighbors and families of Livingston County Illinois: a filled-in hole.

And no, we have no plans of inviting you on our property to “prove” the hole is filled in since you managed to cite us for non-compliance by merely reading my blog you can certainly un-cite us using your same in-depth investigative methods.