Imagine having your mailbox destroyed eight times because drivers can’t slow down near your house. That’s what happened to one man in Tennessee who finally got so fed up with the repeated property damage that he decided to rebuild his mailbox from scratch with far stronger building materials. Fortunately, the man works as a general contractor, so he knows his way around a drill and a hammer. Now if the mailbox gets hit, it probably won’t be going down without a fight.
Man had his mailbox struck eight times by reckless drivers
One man has chosen to reconstruct his mailbox with concrete after drivers have collided with it multiple times, as posted in a video by Travis Howard (@builtbyvideo) that has since garnered 3 million views on TikTok.
“That mailbox right there has a story,” Howard says. “That mailbox got hit eight different times.”
The self-described general contractor from middle Tennessee described the problem in two parts on the platform. The first video called his mailbox “the final boss of the road” because it has been the last thing that many drivers have hit before coming to a halt. A gallery of images near the end of the clip shows the mailbox being obliterated and a litany of cars and trucks that are seen overturned, smashed, or otherwise disabled.
The trouble stems from the two-way, single-lane road that his mailbox sits next to. One side of the road is a straight path with a few slight hills and dips, while the other side is one long curve that makes drivers feel comfortable enough speeding through without braking.
“People fly through here all the freakin’ time,” Howard explains. “And what happens is, these people have these bald tires and they fly through that curve. And then all of a sudden, they’re in my yard.”
He says that vehicles have crashed not only into his mailbox, but into other objects nearby, like one of the light poles, two separate trees, his neighbor’s car, and his own car when it was in the driveway.
On top of that, he had to chase the last person that hit his mailbox so that the person would pay for the damages. When he finally made it to the suspect’s house, he had the cops tell the person to contact their insurance, which thankfully paid for the mailbox repair. But at that point, Howard had had enough.
Man rebuilds mailbox with heavy concrete reinforcement
Putting his building knowledge to work, Howard reconstructed his metal mailbox by using slabs of concrete. “Please don’t hit my mailbox again,” he says, “’cause you’re going to get messed up.”
The video shows the mailbox being constructed with multiple posts inside the wooden facade, with the numbers “1653” along the side of it as part of his address, that are driven into the concrete below. “Two and a half yards of concrete” was poured into the foundation of the receptacle that goes down four feet, so that the mailbox is reinforced by “four thousand pounds” of stone.
He says a part of the reason why the new mailbox is so large is because the original plot of dirt it stood on kept getting wider and larger with every new collision.
One user on TikTok said he witnessed Howard pouring concrete for the mailbox and chuckled at the new construction: “I drive by your mailbox everyday I felt so bad it seemed like every time you got it fixed it went down within 2 days and then I saw you pouring the concrete and laughed my ass off.”
Some users were afraid that the concrete-reinforced mailbox would cause more dangerous accidents later down the road, but others were quick to say that Howard was in his rights to make it sturdier. Some suggested that he place reflectors or giant rocks around the mailbox as a defensive measure.
Another user wrote that it would be a more proper solution for Howard and his neighbors “to petition for speed reduction measures along that end,” like a speed limit, a speed bump, or reflectors. Howard agreed with this, saying “I’ve tried, but probably not hard enough.” For now, though, his reinforced mailbox will have to suffice.
