Mailbox Makeover

Behold our white plastic dinosaur mailbox:

We have been living with this rust bucket since day 1 and I finally decided something had to be done. Aside from that, we had removed the outdated house numbers plaque from the top of our garage and never got around to replacing it with something more modern (I wonder if this is why some of our packages never made it to our house... hmmm...)

We were procrastinating because our house is entirely brick and stucco, and there's really no decent spot to drill numbers into. So I figured I'd knock both projects off the list by combining them somehow.

Step #1: Get a new mailbox:

I realized when mailbox shopping that these things are quite costly. I didn't want to use a standard wood post, so I did some bargain hunting and found this nice black post here for around $45 shipped, which I thought was a great deal compared to similar looking products. Then I picked up a matching black mailbox at Lowe's for around $15.

Next it was time for the house numbers.

I didn't want to just slap some vinyl numbers onto the side of the mailbox, so I had to get a litte creative.

I grabbed a leftover piece of trim (from our foyer board & batten) and decided it was the perfect size to make my own plaque.

After trimming the wood to size and painting it a bright white, I carefully chose my font and printed out two copies onto sticky-back paper (one for each side):

 Here is where a Silhouette machine would really have come in handy. Unfortunately, I am sans Silhouette, so I grabbed an Xacto knife and got to work the old fashioned way.

All done... wasn't so bad.

Then I carefully applied my template to both sides of the plaque and gave them a few coats of ORB spray paint (sorry, no pics of this step).

Once dry, I peeled back the liner to reveal my numbers.

It worked!

Finally, I gave the plaque a couple good coats of poly to weather seal it.

Once it was dried and cured, I put four screw eye hooks (2 for each side) into both the wood and the bottom of the mailbox. Then I used some simple S hooks to hang them... and voila!

For under $60, our mailbox is no longer the embarassment of the neighborhood. And now the UPS man can't miss our house, which is a good thing because our kitchen cabinet handles are scheduled to arrive any minute. And you know what that means.... kitchen reveal soon!