New MailBox

We’ve been planning on moving our mailbox for a while, we just hadn’t quite gotten to it yet. We had the pipes marked, got our digging permit, and then life got in the way (as usual). Then we got the official notice from our town that they were going to start digging up our street for the repaving and new curbing this week (as I’m posting this, one cannot drive down our street!). This lit a fire under us - once they dug up the street we would lose what was left of our pipeline markers and it was the perfect time to make holes in our front yard since they would be making them worse shortly.

We decided to keep things simple with our new mailbox and just make it a little nicer than our old one. Anything fancy or large would look weird with our house. We bought a bag of cement, a pressure-treated 4x4 post, and a new simple inexpensive mailbox. Our existing mailbox had dings and rust when we bought the house. I spray painted it gray and it looked nice for a while, but then the rust started to bleed back through. It just didn’t look good anymore.

Mike built a new box post/stand by cutting up the 4x4 and a piece of leftover scrap 2x4 in the garage to make an angled brace. I was impressed by how quickly he put the whole thing together.

We dug a new hole near the driveway, carefully avoiding the water lines. At first I was disappointed we couldn’t place the mailbox a little closer to the driveway, but then I realized that at least this way nobody (ahem...me…) will accidentally back up into it. We put the post in the hole and made sure it was the right height and plumb. While one of us held the post in place, the other filled the hole with a little gravel (we have a lot of gravel under our deck), and then we poured in the cement and let it set.

While the cement was setting we got rid of the old box. There was so much cement around the post we decided to cut the post instead, several inches below the grass line with the reciprocating saw and just fill the hole back in. We weren’t that careful with the sod placement since the street construction was about to start.

The finished mailbox looks so good!

I also added a pretty house number to the side of the post, but I took the pictures before adding it for privacy reasons. You can just trust me that the black house number looks nice on the bright white post with the black mailbox.

Since the construction company is about to come in and dig up the street, we are postponing the mailbox garden until the new curbing is in since I don’t want them hurting the plants. We’ll have to reseed our lawn too, so we’ll revisit everything once it’s all over.