Curbside mailboxes are often the first thing visitors see when they pull up to your house and yet it astounds me to see the poor shape many are in. It’s no secret to vandals that one of  the easiest ways to raise the ire of a homeowner victim is to batter their mail box, after all it’s not something you want to buy often and you especially don’t want to be out in foul weather fixing a post and remounting a mailbox, a necessity to assure continued mail deliveries.

We have come into properties where mailboxes have ended up in an adjacent retention pond, in the woods, or have been battered beyond recognition, subsequently losing a day or two of mail deliveries since some Post Offices apparently leave it up to the discretion of the mail carrier to drive up to the house for a delivery. The remarkable thing is these properties are in nice neighborhoods!
I was first introduced to the Roughneck series of mailboxes a while back and liked the idea of using them on projects. It seemed like a goo idea to incorporate the Roughneck Post and Mounting Kit along with the mailbox.  With a street price of just under $30.00, it’s a bit more expensive than the standard 4”x 4” wooden posts; it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Constructed from durable hard plastic, the Rubbermaid Roughneck Mail Post and Mounting Kit is meant to be a system, to support the Roughneck mailbox. Installation is relatively simple involving driving a 32” galvanized stake into the ground, leaving about a foot exposed where you attach the 40” plastic mail post. The flat mounting base that you attach the Roughneck mailbox fits atop the mounting post and the whole assembly is held together by twelve screws, sounds like a good easy solution? Wrong!  In less than six months kids had the mailbox, post and all on the ground; o much for the ease of installation!

We ended up removing the stage in favor of a section of PVC covered 4’x4’ stock and cementing it into the ground, the old school solution that has lasted to this day.

While, in concept, the Rubbermaid Roughneck Mail post and Mounting Kit seem like a good idea, the very last thing we needed to do was replace a mailbox in inclement weather, something we ended up doing.

To summarize, we invested  $27.00 for the kit  and another $9.00 for cement, lumber and PVC to replace Rubbermaid Roughneck Mail post, though we did utilize the mailbox mounting kit, we invested more time than was necessary utilizing the post. Perhaps mine was a one in a thousand occurrence, but I like to think I learn from prior experience and we have since installed two others on cheaper PVC covered wood posts; you draw your own conclusion.

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