The same deal occurred with this guy who had permission to build a barn and instead made some kind of James Bond penthouse that just looked like a barn. Or the people who turned a pigsty into a four-bedroom house. If it was pigs living there, rolling in shit, sure, fine, whatever. More pigs! But human beings, carefully placing their shit in pipes that take it swiftly away? Totally unacceptable.
But few examples compare to the guy who built a fake castle on his land. Knowing that this was completely not allowed, he hid it behind a 40-foot-tall pile of hay bales. His thinking, if we're being generous enough to call it that, was to try to capitalize on an exemption for people who lived in a structure for four years without anyone complaining about it. So he builds his wall of hay bales, builds his castle behind it, and lives there in secret with his family for four years.
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"All this will one day be yours, son."
Then the four years are up, he takes down the hay, and hey, look at my goddamned castle, neighbors! It turned out, though, that in legal terms, his scheme was "stupid," and the courts ordered the castle torn down, ruling that the local authorities didn't have the chance to object to something they couldn't see. So a sad ending for our maniac, though the fact that an obscenely ugly hay-bale wall was totally acceptable and non-destructive of the "character" of the area suggests a possible happy ending.
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Chris Bucholz is a Cracked columnist and has concealed all sorts of things with hay bales. His first novel, Severance, is incredible and available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Apex Books. Join him on Facebook or Twitter.
For more from Bucholz, check out 6 Things Smartphones Should Be Able to Do by Now and The 12 Most Common Fantasies Teenage Boys Have.
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