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.
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.