Grand Entrance

The long driveway of the Haus of Pane is marked by a beautiful mailbox. See?

Yeah.  Pretty far from that.  Nothing against a plain white mailbox - it gets the job done - but this one has clearly seen better days.  It's almost always missed when I give directions on the phone, thus the driveway is missed, and pizzas get cold while waiting for the driver to find the house.  And it must just be invisible to everyone, because I'm certain it's been hit.  A lot.  Last fall I noticed the door was open, tried to close it, and it didn't line up - so I think it was hit overnight.  The door falling open was a constant issue too - our mail would sometimes be wet inside of the mailbox.  Not just damp from raindrops while exposed between the post lady's car and our box - letters would look like they took a swim in a pool for half an hour, then made their way inside the box to sit in their own puddle. 
It didn't take long before we had had enough, and vowed to rectify the annoyance as soon as the ground thawed. 
[fast forward to April, when the ground thawed]
We sketched out a few ideas of stuff I had floating in my head - I wanted it to look MidCentury Modern [or at least reminiscent of that style] but not break the bank.  Did you know that the really cool mailboxes out there can cost a few hundred bucks?  For JUST the mailbox?  I love this one, but I'm certain that's just the box.  Post is sold separately.  And I'm just too much of a tightwad for that ;)  So! I designed something that could incorporate a normal-priced mailbox, and add some decorative bits for pizzazz [people just don't say pizzazz enough].  Said decorative bits were to be simple, but large enough to incorporate large numbers [so people can, you know, see them] and I wanted a nice angle to echo the angle of our gorgeous house.
Once we decided on a mailbox - super simple design in classic black - and a post [nice and sturdy in case it gets hit], and decided the decorative bits would be made from 1x8 boards, I made a crude sketch in Illustrator [to scale, of course] to make sure all the numbers were going to work out:

Brandon set up shop in the garage and did all the cutting, and I did a loooot of sanding:

Then there was priming and painting and drying [photos MIA.  but I'm sure you can imagine what painting looks like]  We went with the same grey as the house, so everything matches!
We picked these numbers [which look a lot like these Neutra numbers but a whole lot cheaper]

And then it got a little weird.  The installation calls for drilling a hole a little larger than the screws, put the screws in the number, put a bunch of silicone in the holes, then dropping the numbers & screws into the holes.  So you basically glue them onto your house [or, in this case, 'decorative bits']
Problem is, the screws were longer than the thickness of our boards, and they'd stick out the back, so we just decided to glue the things on, sans screws.  Taking out a step is always fun.
Seems good so far!  I'll of course keep you posted.
THEN!  After two weekends of solid rain that foiled our best laid plans, we finally had some sun on a Sunday afternoon.  And my digger got to digging.

"Oh, no!  Sorry, Brandon I guess I'm just bad at digging - and you're really good at it"  ;)

He dug the hole with a post hole digger, flattened the area around the decorative bits to make room for it to spread out and be even, and then mixed the cement so the whole thing is more permanent-like.

For a few hours they existed as equals, though everyone that passed the two of them knew they were far from equal.

And - on a Monday morning - I killt it.  

[then my digger had to work super hard to get the base out of the ground - turns out it was about 3' long, all underground.  I was legitimately shocked.]

_______________________

Soon after, Phase 2 happened - the prettification of the mailbox!

To set it off, and to keep the grass from getting tall and obscuring our beautiful numbers, we made a pretty rock bed all around.  We chose white marble rocks, because they fit with our clean look, but were also surprisingly cheap!  $3.78 a bag, and while it took 5 to fill up the bed, that's still less than $20 to make it look super fly.

Add a perimeter of paver stones to keep the rock bed in check [about $1.15 each] and it's done!

The mailbox itself has a magnetic closure, so no more door hanging open!  And the flag is metal too!  Feels nice and sturdy.  And if you see the back, you see the brackets my metalsmith [Brandon, as I mentioned in the previous post] made and powder coated in black.  The brackets are attached to each board with screws, each board is attached together with hidden dowels, and they have a 90 degree turn which is attached to the steel post.  This thing isn't going anywhere.  [And if someone hits our mailbox now, I kind of really hope it does damage to the hitter's car.]

This summer the grass will fill in, and in the fall I'll plant some bushes around the box and on the other side of the drive [for symmetry, of course], and we'll finally have ourselves a pretty entrance!

______________________

Everything seemed perfect for a week, then we both noticed a few times that one of the paver edges looked wonky.  One time I fixed it, and once Brandon fixed it, and it happened again.  Which means our mail lady is running over our it with her mail-mobile. 

This means war.  I have ideas for defense/retaliation.