A Mailbox Makeover | Time for some Curb Appeal

The other day as I was getting the mail it suddenly occurred to me that my mailbox was looking terribly tired and ugly. Eww. See for yourself:

When we moved in, the previous owners had their last name on the side of it with these cheap sticky letters from Home Depot....and when I removed them, the adhesive was all over the mailbox. I was too lazy preoccupied with other projects, so I just bought some of the cheapo letters to spell our last name and covered up the yucky adhesive with our name.

But as you can see, the letters haven't weathered the storm, so to speak. Wisconsin winters and a bunch of shaving cream from that time we got TPed kind of took their toll on the cheapo letters from Home Depot. The other side has our house number with some more durable, yet still ugly numbers.

Yikes. The post wasn't looking so hot either. Since this is one of the first things you see when you pull up to our house, it is obviously not giving the best first impression from the street. Clearly time for a makeover. I knew this would only take an hour or so, So I knocked it out while my littlest babe was sleeping one afternoon this week.

We don't get the paper version of the newspaper, so I took off the little sidecar. At least that's what it reminds me of. And since it is just constantly getting filled with fliers and papers that we put right into the recycling, I figure completely removing it may cut down on the clutter... hopefully the flier delivery people, whoever they may be will just skip us and over time we will even save a tree, perhaps?

The first thing I did was wrap the red flag in tinfoil and I sprayed the entire thing with primer. Rustoleum painters touch. My fave.

Next I sprayed just the mailbox in one of my favorite Rustoleum colors, Summer Squash in Satin finish.
I thought the white post would look nice with the new white trim on our house.

Hmm. But something just wasn't right... this color combination wasn't sitting well with me and the post was going to need many many coats of white to look right. So I sprayed the post with some Rustoleum black in a flat finish that I had sitting in the garage.

Okay, so I like the post much better but the yellow and black combo felt too bumblebee to me... So I busted out my trusty Rustoleum Lagoon in Satin Finish, and I was finally diggin' it.

I let it all dry for about 30 minutes and then stuck on my new house numbers from Vinyl Concepts.

Next I sprayed over the numbers with some Polyurethane Clear Coat to protect it from those nasty Wisconsin winters I mentioned earlier... I think I'm actually going to go out there and do about 3 more coats of that, just to be sure. 

The total cost for this makeover was only $3...which was the cost of the vinyl numbers. I had all the paint just laying around in the garage. I'm so happy with the result. Makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

 Its the little things, right?