Summer Projects 2013 - The Mailbox

Our old mailbox post - many years of faithful service

We've had mailbox issues ever since we bought our house. First off, the house came with a nice red Nebraska Cornhuskers mailbox. So that had to go right away. The post still had issues though. As you can see, it was pretty old, probably the original one that came with the house in 1975. Sometimes the mailbox would get a little wobbly, and we'd get a warning from the post office, so we'd do a quick fix to keep it in place. We share a post with our neighbor, and they experienced similar issues. I think at one point, their mailbox was just on the ground for an extended period.

New mailbox post - fashioned from materials we already had

 
So this last summer, I believe on the day we returned home from our summer camping trip, our neighbor was fixing to replace it because the post office had issued her an ultimatum that they would not deliver any more mail until she fixed it by X date. So she had bought some materials. My super great wife went out and told her that we would help her. At some point we decided that we already had the materials needed, leftovers from various fence and porch projects of the past year. So we went to work on it immediately. We based the design on the previous post and it went quickly.

Finished product - ready to give another 40 years

We only ran into one sticking point when we found our drill wasn't quite powerful enough to secure the two posts together, so we had to go across the street and enlist the help of another neighbor who has a ton of tools.
 
But we got it up in one evening. We even had some leftover Quickrete so we mixed some up and made it extra secure. The neighbors were super impressed with my wife's construction and design skills although they didn't comment on mine at all. Maybe because I don't have any. Anyways, we are glad to finally get that project done!