We've got mail.......box

After 6 months of concerted (read: totally disorganized) effort, we finally have a mailbox up at our new place. We moved in to our new home over Easter weekend, and now on the eve of Halloween and the other fall holidays, we have a new home for our mail to go.

It has taken 6... no, wait, 7 trips to Home Depot, 2 trips to Lowes, several hours of online searches, and many, many trips to the end of our driveway to complete this surprisingly complicated project. First we got the box. Then we had to go back to try to find the right post for the box. And go back again to try to find a post. And look somewhere else for it, then go back to the first place to see if we could settle on one of theirs. Then go back to the second, before finally determining the first one we saw would do the job just fine. Then there was the contemplation of house numbers. Oh, the agony. Finally, we found the right numbers but decided we'd need to stain the post for them to show up properly. Another trip - first for the stain, then back for a brush because we realized we couldn't find out paintbrushes from the move. And so on, and so forth.

We have had the post in the ground for about 5 months now, and have just been waiting on the right opportunity to stain it. Finally, I began working on the project in baby steps over my lunch hour a few weeks ago, and go us to the point of needing just the box.

After much ado (I'll spare the oh-so-exciting and gory details) (By the way, have I mentioned how well Chris and I work together? It's amazing we're both still alive after building this house, I tell ya.), we finally were getting the box set in place last night, just as a couple of the builder's guys drove by. They, of course, had to stop and congratulate us on completing this massive task, which they could have completed in under an hour if we hadn't been so damn cheap to want to save the $20 we'd have had to pay in contractor's fees. I seriously can't remember why we chose not to do that, and I'm electing to not remember that that was an option from here on out.

Hey, when you've got a 10 month old, a new house, 13 acres in dire need of maintanance, and you both work full time, you celebrate the small victories.

Who wants to bet the first piece of correspondence we get after all this effort is junk mail?