Wednesday Makeovers - Mailbox

We bought our house 8 1/2 years ago. It came complete with one of the world's ugliest mailboxes. It had a roof on it. A cedar shake roof.  I believe our neighbor told us that one of the previous owners hung a sign advertising an in home daycare underneath the roof. Makes sense I guess.

Still, it was hideous and I hated it since DAY ONE. Dave always thought it was a great defining characteristic of our home, however. (Don't you love the little arguments like this between husband and wife?) He enjoyed giving people directions to our place and ending with "You'll know you're here when you spot the mailbox with the roof on it." Ugh!

What's worse is that over the past 8 1/2 years the shakes have been slowly rotting in the rain and growing disgusting green stuff. I was SO over it.

Anyways, we're preparing to put our house up for sale soon and are currently working on curb appeal. On the Fourth of July, I finally talked Dave into taking the circular saw to the mailbox post and getting rid of that ugly roof.

We then worked to "redesign" the post by cutting it off at 45 degree angles behind where the box will sit and adding a brace (we reused part of the 4x4 that used to hold the roof up- free) under where the mailbox will sit for more support. We probably could have saved a lot of work by just buying a nice new mailbox post from Lowe's but that would have involved spending more money and mixing up concrete for a new post "foundation" and of course getting the old post out pulled up out of it's old concrete "foundation" and that just sounded like more work than we wanted to do by hand. (After growing up on farms with tractors and bobcats readily available it is so hard to justify doing big projects like that by hand when you own a little 1 acre property in suburbia...)

Moving on, we used some paint that we had leftover from repainting our garden shed to match our home's pale yellow vinyl siding and repainted the mailbox post. It is so amazing what a little paint can do to spruce up an old nasty mailbox post!

Here's an "in progress" photo of my hubby Dave :)

We then purchased a new black shiny mailbox at Lowe's for $17 and replaced our old nasty rusty one with mismatched stickers all over it. We also dug out around the concrete that the post is poured in and moved some dirt around to backfill the hole and make it stand up more straight since it was leaning an awful lot.

 

We had also purchased some new numbers for the post but then decided that we'd rather have our $32 back so we returned them to Lowe's and instead spray painted the old numbers black with an extra can of spray paint we had lying around. Not reflective but we still feel they're highly visible at night in a headlight against the pale yellow post...In our days of delivering papers we've both seen a lot worse.

 

Here's the finished product that evening (taken right before we went to see FIREWORKS!). We are so glad we did this little mailbox makeover. It only cost $17 (since the paint we already owned) and probably 1-2 hours of time but it made a HUGE difference in curb appeal! My only regret is that we did not do it 8 1/2 years ago...