Go for the fences

I got up this morning and noticed that our gate was lying on the driveway, a few inches from where the car was parked. That wasn’t the right place for it to be.
When the fence was installed a year before we moved in, they used treated posts that would resist rotting. But instead of placing the posts in concrete, they just went into the soil, and so, given three years of Seattle’s damp climate, the post rotted at the bottom, and then a gust of wind caught the gate and snapped the post off at ground level.

Thankfully, I parked the car six inches clear of where the gate fell, avoiding an insurance claim where I worry the loss adjuster would tell me it was my fault for hitting my car with my gate.

Meanwhile, I asked the builders to put the mailbox on a post, and because they had nothing to do today while waiting for the city inspector to come, they made the most insanely overbuilt mount for the mailbox I could imagine. Two inch thick bolts hold a 6"x6" wooden post against a large rock in the front garden, and this huge post has a second length of 6"x6" on top of it, which the mailbox itself sits on. It looks like it could withstand somebody driving a car into it, let alone an errant fence post snapping off in a high wind.