Project House: Spiffing Up the Mailbox

If you go back and look at the photo of the front of the project house, you can see that we started out with a mailbox with a red post and a decorative floral magnetic wrap on it. We also had a collection of pots at the front of the house. I gave most of these pots and any live plants that were in them to a friend of mine who has a perpetually green thumb. I kept one large one and painted it with Rustoleum Painter's One Touch in the color Seaside. I'm not much of a gardener, so I stuck a rosemary in it because I know I can keep that alive. Then I surrounded it with some colorful annuals. The house is going to wind up being gray and tan and brown, so it needs a little something-something. 

Then I set my sights on the mailbox. I looked into replacing it with something ultra cool and mid-century looking, but after a mild heart attack brought on my sticker shock, I decided to update what I had. After evicting several snails and washing off a fair amount of bird poo, we replaced the rotted support board. I gave the mailbox a couple of coats of the One Touch in the color Lagoon. Then, I painted the post in Dark Chocolate by Clark & Kensington. It reminds me of the color you see in state and national parks, so of course, it is now being referred to as State Park Brown.

Once it was painted and dried, I cleaned out a bunch of leaves and got rid of as much of the lava rock that was around it as possible. I am not a fan of lava rock, mostly because it's sharp and I tend to not wear gloves when I garden. Then I moved in 3 large white stones I had found in the back yard and filled the area in with Ajuga, which I hope will fill in the entire area leaving just the stones peeking out. It's a fairly hardy ground cover and the area gets some shade, so here's to plant survival in Texas!