The Clever Badger I'm not dead yet!

The Mailbox

My neighborhood, like many, has a set of deed restrictions - a list of Thou Shalt Nots that the Neighborhood Association hopes will keep property values at attractive levels.  Some of the more amusing ones in my case stipulate how many and what types of plants I must have in my landscaping, and what sort of animals I'm allowed to have.  I can have normal "pet" animals, but I can't (for example) raise chickens, nor can I keep reptiles.¹

Some people on the Neighborhood association take these deed restrictions very seriously.  There is at least one lady who roams the neighborhood with a notebook and counts shrubs, and there is one gentleman who set up a motion-activated video camera in his living room to catch teenagers walking in the neighborhood after dark.  Apparently walking while young is a problem that most of us weren't aware of.  He was quite concerned when he offered to give his taped evidence to the police so they could investigate and was met with an official "Meh" from law enforcement.

Right.

We also have an official neighborhood mailbox style.  It's a decorative, cast-metal job with pineapple-looking things (or they could be alien eggs...) on top with some fancy scrollwork.  They are, per the unchanging law of the deed restrictions, painted white, and must be maintained in "attractive" condition.  Once a year, usually about this time, we all get a letter from the Neighborhood Mailbox Compliance Officer, letting us know that some people have allowed their mailboxes to get a little rusty and because of that we all need to get off our asses and clean them up.

This makes perfect sense.  Personally, whenever I drive through any neighborhood, the first thing I do is evaluate their mailboxes.  In fact, just the other day, I cut through a nearby subdivision on the way to Target, and what kept going through my head was:  "This place is going to hell in a handbasket because that dude there has a skanky looking rusty mailbox.  I should stop the car and get whoever owns such a shoddy looking mailbox to come out and fix it up right now!"

According to the letter, it should take no more than 30 minutes for anyone to bring his mailbox into full compliance.  Clearly, the Mailbox Compliance Officer's approach to doing this is to pick up the phone and call someone to do the work, and the 30 minutes includes the time it takes to write a check to the workman.

I prefer to do it myself, which takes a little longer.

Right off the top, I'll say that whoever selected a cast-iron based mailbox with lots of scrollwork and crevices for water to catch in was dumber than a box of toenail clippings.  There is no freakin' way to keep rust from forming on them.  You could encase them in concrete and they'd rust.  This is Kentucky.  It gets humid.  Our rain is acidic.  Stuff rusts.  You can paint it all you want, but it's gonna rust.   Hell, I start to rust if I stay outside too long.

But, metal is what we have, so I try to make the best of it.

The first step in bringing my mailbox into compliance is to clean off any loose rust with a stiff wire brush and a lot of profanity.  The profanity is required because of all the crevices.  These are typically so narrow and deep that no normal wire brush can get down into them, so you end up scraping into them with a nail.  At some point, one of three things will happen:  the bristles from the wire brush will get driven into your hand, a dislodged chunk of rust will somehow get past the perimeter of your safety glasses and end up in your eye, or the nail you're scraping with will break off in one of the crevices where it will form the anchor for next year's crop of rust.

Once the loose rust has been removed, it's time to take a shot at the more tightly bound rust.  This is done by liberally painting the surface of the mailbox with Naval Jelly.

Naval Jelly, for those unfamiliar with it, looks like nothing so much as hot pink, corrosive snot.  When you're done with the first part of this effort, your mailbox will look like it has been sneezed on by a unicorn with a severe sinus infection.²

Let the Naval Jelly set for a while, go drink a beer, and get ready for the next part.

For the next step, you'll need a pressure washer and a blowtorch.

The pressure washer is necessary because the force from a normal hose is completely insufficient to rinse off the Naval Jelly, particularly out of the crevices.

The blowtorch is necessary because once you've rinsed off the Naval Jelly, you have water sitting on exposed metal that you've just gone through the effort of de-rusting.  The only way to quickly remove this water from all the nooks and crannies is with heat.  I think many of my neighbors skip this step.  The decorative parts of my mailbox do accumulate rust, but it's relatively minor compared to a lot of the boxes in the subdivision.  I think they're getting water trapped under the paint.  I suppose you could drive the water off of the mailbox by rinsing the whole thing with acetone or something, but that's not nearly as fun as fire.

Once you've rinsed and dried the thing, the remaining steps are simple:  use a good rust-inhibiting primer paint and cover the entire mailbox.  Twice.  Then deploy at least two coats of white outdoor spray paint.

There you go.  Fried gold.

If you're lucky and didn't inadvertently fail to cover a spot, you should be able to get 2 years out of such a treatment.  Realistically you'll get one, because by the time you've finished the first coat of primer, you'll start rushing and will do something completely boneheaded like not paint the bottom of the mailbox, and by the time you notice that you've got a bunch of rust stalactites growing off the bottom and your brother in the next subdivision over is telling you that they can have wooden mailboxes and they don't rust.

-Jay

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¹I've always been a little puzzled by this one. Was this a pre-emptive clause? Or was there someone in the early phases of the neighborhood who did something to prompt such a restriction? There are whispers of the Gila Monster Incident of '91, but nobody wants to talk about it...

²Learn from my mistakes. Wear gloves when using this crap. The happy hot-pink color belies the fact that Naval Jelly is a fairly potent acid. If you get it on your hands, you won't immediately notice it but within a minute or so you'll feel the burn. And don't forget safety glasses. You don't want this stuff in your eyes.