Concrete block mailbox

joeyboy

I figured this would be a quick, easy project that would do a great deal at upping my house's visual appeal from the street.

I should note right now that I've read much online to the effect of these being your responsibility - ie don't just build it w/o researching what you're doing or you could end up liable for problems down the road (for instance, you build it waaay too solid and a car totals when it hits it, you may be liable. Or, maybe you don't know how to build a proper footing and it falls, that'd be a potential nightmare if someone were near it when it happened.


Now, in the pics it looks like the thing's dimensions are all over the place. That is my stucco base coat that's wavy as heck (thank the pack of neighborhood kids on summer vacation standing by my side the entire time lol).


This will be getting a finish coat of tan stucco (travertine finish) real soon, and will have my home's street number on both sides horizontally.



I dug a suitable base, and used high strength concrete and (5) 2ft long, 1/2" wide rebar poles as my footer/base (yes, I like to err waaay on the side of overstrengthening things lol). Once my base/footing cured a couple days, i used standard 8"X8"X16" cmu/concrete blocks to build it up. I used 2 blocks per row, alternating their orientation. I left the cores of teh blocks hollow (except the bottom row that you see, those are filled cores with rebar coming into them from the footing).

Main obstacles in this project were:
-determining the setback from the curb/height requirements imposed by usps.
-figuring the tips that make big differences (things like making the mailbox itself, not the column, slightly tilted forward, so water won't just sit in the mailbox)
- figuring out a way to make the arch at the top (I used bricks/stucco to piece that together)
- figuring out a way to get the flag onto it without it looking like a hack job (I did this by taking the flag off the mailbox, and grabbing a piece of metal I had laying around. I put the flag onto that metal, and then bent the metal to form a 'spike' that I squished with mortar into the core of one of my bricks that was used to form the arch)

(oh, remember you'd you want an aluminum mailbox, it'd be a real pita if your box rusted out in a couple years and was stuck in the structure you built lol).


Again, this thing looks like it's unbalanced, but that's just the stucco having been applied in a really poor manner. It won't look all funhouse when the final layer goes up.

Not Sure

No one will ever knock your mailbox over with a baseball bat!

Really, it looks like it's going to be a great addition to your home. Very unique and attractive!

joeyboy

Thanks! Yeah, no bat will be able to take him down

6stringmason

Did you get the added curb appeal you wanted with that?

joeyboy

I think so! I do want to put some plants around its base so it doesn't look so much like a tombstone lol! (oh it's finished now, so it's got the same tan stucco finish as the house, metal #'s on the side, and isn't so 'funhouse' curvy/wavy as those pics lol!)

bofusmosby

I had a friend years ago, that these idiots would drive by the mailboxes at night and would knock them over with a baseball bat. My friend lost 2 of them in about 10 days. He got fed up, so he made one similar to the one pictured. He had some plants that had been growing at the base of the mailbox for years. Because of this, these idiots didn't notice the drastic change. He waited, and a few days later after dark, he saw them drive by again, and when the bat hit the mailbox, because the car was moving, it broke his arm (at least he thought it looked broken, the way it was swinging out the window of the car). Its kinda funny.....the neighborhood hasn't lost a mailbox since!

joeyboy

I did build it for aesthetic reasons, but I'd be lying if I said that wasn't a plus! That thing is diesel as hell, they'd probably break their arm if they tried something! I'm more worried about kids ripping the arm off the thing more than anything else!

Big Bob

Have the neighbors dogs found it yet?

joeyboy

haha nah just the birds as far as I've seen! I'm sure there's anoles and stuff living in it, because, well, they seem to get in everything outdoors!

tkristi

hmmm..thats diffrent lol kinda cool

joeyboy

damn kristi I think you're just knocking all my photos lol!!

What's different about it? Before the build my bro and I drove through a ton of neighborhoods taking hundreds of pix (not just mailboxes, just tons of stuff for renovation ideas), that's a pretty standard block mailbox. It'd be more standard if I had a horizontal band on it about midway, with my accent color (dark red), but there's too many neighborhood kids around 5 y/o that I don't want it to become a ladder lol!

It does look, well, we all know what it looks like if ya got a dirty mind

When that landscape bed gets done, the last one I need to do, I'm thinking of some cataracta palms on either side, maybe even behind, the mailbox to smooth it in a bit.

tkristi

Ohhh No...Its just diffrent is all.. and yes I have a very dirty Mind lol
but the Palms you are talking about will give it a nice look I think

bofusmosby

It sounds like it not only will look really nice, but will stand up to the test of time. Let'em try to know this one down. You ought to post a photo when you get everything completed. Sounds like you got some good ideas.

joeyboy

Or look like abstract hair



Ya this one shouldn't be going anywhere!! I should mention something though about the construction on these. I read numerous accounts that warned that, if a car nails one of these, and it's solid as hell, you can be liable for damages. On the other hand, you can't have a flimsy mailbox that weighs that much! The build was a huuuuuge underground anchor (quite larger and heavier, and like 5-10X the footprint of the mailbox) that anchored into the bottom row of concrete blocks with rebar <anchor also had rebar in it>, and the runs past the bottom row are hollow core blocks, entire thing done with blocks/mortar and finished same stucco texture as the rest of my house. (felt I should add that, I'd hate to see someone just start tossing concrete blocks on a quasi-flat spot of dirt and presume the weight will hold it in place or something lol, I definitely should've taken pics of the anchor/foot this thing has in the ground!)

DeeTee

That one should take a beating and still hold up. Now the mailbox in the accompanying photo might not fare as well.

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