Mailbox

January, 2013

The mailbox that came with our house was falling apart and really had to go but this is the only work I have done on the house that I had mixed feeling about doing. The previous owners last name was and they had painted a cute little fox on the side of the mailbox.

Obviously not applicable to us but I would have happily left it there as a nod to the previous owners and their life if the mailbox was still functional but unfortunately it wasn't.

It was a flimsy mailbox with subpar installation. It only took one hand to pull up and throw to the side.

That wasn't going to be the case for my replacement though. I headed over to McCoys and picked up an old railroad tie to use as a base. Installation is a pretty straight forward process, dig a hole and put it in but there is one tip I learned from installing fences on summer. Dig the hole (this time 3ft deep) and ram up the bottom few inches all around. Then ram up one side all the way to the top, the post will now be tilted to one side but you take a come-along or something else and then pull the post back to vertical. Then pack it in on the empty side. This lets you dig a smaller hole and get much better compaction all around so the post stay upright and doesn't move.

After the post was installed I simply cut the top off to the right height and mounted the beefiest mailbox I could find.

Next I touched up the post with some more tar and installed the street number.

If you haven't seen letters exactly like these before it might be because I couldn't find what I wanted. Everything was either in the wrong script, made out of cheap materials or required mounting from behind. What do you do then? I am sure I could have found what I wanted if I searched long enough online but I wanted to finish the project instead of dicking around so I dropped by a friends house one evening to share a couple beers and cut out some stainless numbers with his plasma table. If I did it again and had the material lying around I would probably go a little thicker but I am happy with them as is and don't see any need to touch that mailbox again.