We knew this right after we moved in. The people who used to live in our house before we bought it were morons. Everything was half-assed. Everything was done wrong. I resigned myself to having to fix all the things that they did wrong and I’ve been doing it for the past almost 8 years.

Here we go again.

This is one of those things that were just stupid, but most of them are. When we moved in, our mailbox out front was on a wooden post that had apparently  been there for years and was rotting. My next door neighbor’s box was on the same post, so I never felt I could just replace it without making contact and they were never around. Therefore, I just left it alone until I figured something out.

Then, maybe 4 years ago, they sold the house and moved and the people who moved in, they took their box off of the post and put in their own metal one. Great, I thought, now I can do something about it. I went over and pulled on the 4×4 post and it popped out of the ground, rotted to the core.

No big deal, I thought. I went to Lowes, bought a nice new metal post, the only one that they had in stock at the time, but it should work, right? It was a 2-piece that hooked together in the middle and I installed it right into the same hole that the old one came out of. Concrete poured, done, right?

Nope. Within 6 months, I realized that what I had bought sucked. Every couple of months, the set screws that kept the two halves together, it loosened enough that the pole was no longer straight. I’d have to run out there with an allen key and tighten it down, only to have it happen again. Even with threadlocker, it didn’t matter, it kept getting loose, and I’m sure the extremes in heat and cold that we have didn’t help.

Therefore, I decided it’s time to replace it with a nice 1-piece unit. It’s much thicker, much stronger and more importantly, much more stable than what it was replacing. In fact, as I pulled the last one out, I realized that if I put in any effort, I could get the walls of this thin steel tube to flex with my fingers. That’s not a good thing.

I set aside a Sunday, since there wasn’t any mail, got all the stuff together and originally was going to slot the new post over the lower part of the old one until I realized that there was no way to sink it into the ground through the existing concrete that I had already poured. I then spent an hour digging all of that out and making a nice big hole… only to find that the people who had put in the original wooden post, they were idiots.

They had taken a 5-gallon plastic bucket, sunk it 18″ underground, filled it with concrete and sunk the unprotected end of a 4×4 into it. It probably lasted a long time, but since it was buried, the wood rotted off at the concrete line, leaving a bucket full of concrete underground. Most of the bucket rotted away, leaving just this massive hunk of concrete, it must have been 100lbs worth, just sitting there, in the way of where my post needed to go. There was no way that I was going to go rent a jackhammer to get it out of the way.

Luckily, when my neighbors had put in their own post, they had put it back a little further than the original wooden post had been, so I just dug behind it, ignored the original concrete bucket mess, and slid the new post in-line with theirs, at the exact same height as theirs. My new hole butted up against the mass of concrete and I just filled in around it with about 50lbs of my own and called it a day. That thing is never moving because it’s tied to at least 150lbs of concrete anchor underground. It looks great now, you’d never know what’s underground, but this is the kind of thing that I have to deal with constantly. If there was a half-assed way they could do something, that’s how they did it. No permits, no inspections, they just did their own thing, wrong, and now I have to fix it.

At least I know it’s done as right as you can do it now. There’s some small comfort in that, I guess.