Mailboxes
Just bought a reno-ed BK brownstone and need to install mailboxes. Do I need to install USPS approved boxes or can I install whatever I like?
mom
in General Discussion 4 years and 5 months ago
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11 replies
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 5 months ago
i read something that you can have one made but it must meet certain specs. they can approve it.
brokelin | 4 years and 5 months ago
If your issue with the USPS approved mailboxes is how they look, you can have one brass plated – that’s what we did, as we liked the look of our original brass mailboxes in our 1890’s foyer – they just weren’t very functional anymore.
Though I’ve seen the boxes available in more finishes than the silver or gold colored ones that were all that was available when we bought ours, so you might be able to get a decent look in them now now without doing so.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 5 months ago
jane: no we do not want to alienate them. but for anyone doing a job to hold that threat over us – implied or otherwise – is wrong. i cannot go in to my job working on doors with an agreement and then if the customer expects me to follow the rules, let them think i will use inferior paint or something to punish them. they have a job to do and i would bet they get compensated pretty good to suffer the bad weather (i don’t hear them complaining about their pay and benefits). it is just more of people wanting to do less and take less responsibility. if they do not want to do it, don’t take the job.
mozeeatupu | 4 years and 5 months ago
BTW, the home depot ones say USPS approved in the description.
Guest User | 4 years and 5 months ago
I knew exactly what the mailman was after. Yes he doesn’t want to climb a few steps and I don’t want to alienate my mail man and do empathize with him. Not the most fun job and not to mention the bad weather days.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 5 months ago
Even if you follow brokelins first sentance, you could still run amuck with the postal service because they do not know their own policies. And if you piss them off because you are right about one thing, if you have an unhappy carrier, they will find something else.
brokelin | 4 years and 5 months ago
It’s a matter of federal law – I suggest you look it up and follow it. It might have to do with the number of units in the building.
I once looked up the law, and cited it to my landlord in a letter, when I rented a half-floor apartment that had been created from a full-floor unit in a Manhattan building just before I rented it, after my landlord dragged his feet for months about installing a larger mailbox unit so I could have a mailbox. No, I was not fine with my mail getting put into the locked box, to which I did not have a key, that belonged to the dude who rented the other unit on the floor!!! Especially since I had asked about it before signing the lease and had been assured that a new mailbox with enough boxes for all the now existing units would be installed. (My letter got him to act, finally – he wasn’t a small owner, but owned a huge chunk of the Village.)
I believe that the law then required locked boxes in buildings with over a certain number of units – it has been three decades since then, and these laws change every so often. So check what the la w is now – you won’t want the potential hassle of not being compliant with it.
When I moved to my next rental, an owner-occupied brownstone in Brooklyn, with rentals on the top two floors and the landlords in the lower floors duplex, I was fine with the mail being put in the slot through the door at the top of the stoop – whoever got home first sorted the mail in to three piles for the three units and left them on top of the radiator in the stairwell. I have no idea if that was legal then (I believe it was), or if it would be legal now (I don’t know – I seem to remember reading somewhere that the law on mailboxes has changed, likely on this site.)
Getting boxes that comply with the law is not hard – everything you can buy for multi-unit buildings will likely be compliant with the law (that’s why they’re sold as “post office approve.” When I ordered and had installed new mailboxes for my coop building in my next place, when some people kept complaining that the tiny, likely original 1890s boxes with the half-doors that flip up wouldn’t hold their magazines, it was easy, and seamless with the post office – it just required a bit of communication with our mail carrier, and with the post office about putting their master lock (the one the mail carrier opened with the key kept in the keep keeper outside) into our new mailbox – and I hired a local contractor to install the bigger box and trim it out for us.
I had been fine with the mail carrier putting the magazines in the communal basket we had in the foyer for overflow mail. But when someone suggested that we hang four unlocked mailboxes in the foyer, the kind you’d have on a single family home somewhere outside the city where no one steals mail, I reminded the rest of the board that our mail carrier wasn’t likely going to sort our mail into one set of boxes and our magazines into another set of boxes on the other side of the foyer, and that since we were required to provide locked mailboxes in a four-unit building, we might as well replace the 100+ year old tiny boxes with the legally compliant standard larger boxes sold then. I didn’t care about my magazines, but I wanted my regular mail in a locked box, as required by law, given how often someone left the outer foyer door unlocked, and how many people’s friends, contractors, cleaners, newspaper deliverers, etc. had keys to our building. We installed the new boxes, and they worked just fine, they even held all the magazines.
If you have tenants, know that they likely will want (and deserve) timely access to their mail. I would not have been OK with the owner-occupied brownstone situation if the mail was all delivered to a place only the landlords had access to it, say, under their under-the-stoop gate, if we then had to wait for them to get it and sort it for the tenants – they went away for days at a time, as most people do. But we all had access to the mail delivered through the parlor floor mail slot.
It may be less hassle for you to provide locked boxes so that tenants can have access to their mail, whether legally required in your situation. Tenants may (legitimately) not want you or other tenants, or other people who have keys to have access to their mail. You also may want to keep your mail from being able to be accessed by tenants – we were all trustworthy and fine with it in the owner-occupied brownstone I lived in, but not all people are (either trustworthy, or fine with trusting their mail with others with whom they happen to share a building.)
mozeeatupu | 4 years and 5 months ago
I put in ones from Home Depot. Similar to [these](
https://www.homedepot.com/b/Hardware-Mailboxes-Multifamily-Mailboxes-Parcel-Lockers/N-5yc1vZcg04).
No issue from the post office and I just taped the new master key to the keybox and the mailman replaced the old master key with with the new one in the key box.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 5 months ago
ok. so that is what the mail person wants. the mail person wants to climb fewer steps. i just had this conversation this morning with our 50 something year old USPS package delivery person who moves around as if she was in a marathon: i said to her “notice how the younger ones coming along are not as fit as you are?” she said “they are lazy”. so take anything a letter carrier – or any union worker for that matter – tells you with a grain of salt. someplace there is bias and it is not in your favor.
if you build a new building, you have to install it according to their regs (that is why we see these hideous things outside of the newer buildings though perhaps number of units comes into play). if you have an old building that had not ever been done to the regs you are grandfathered and can put it back (i think; read the next paragraph) the way it was. we put things back the way they were all the time. this is usually with mail slots we have to put in historic doors. i cringe at this anyway but when they are not grandfathered – say on the lower portio n of the door, – the options become putting it vertical on the stile or cutting into a panel or mounting an actual box to the fine mortar (I refuse to drill into brownstone).
there is one thing i am not sure of and we have yet to get snagged on it. what constitutes “grandfathered” with the USPS and i am sure that is very different with the DOB. so we remove a door. we keep it for weeks while we work on it (perhaps we cut a slot in the temporary door). when i return it weeks later, is the carrier going to complain that that is a new door and is not grandfathered? or will there be a new carrier who never saw the old door and make a complaint?
this nonsense is not unfounded. we have a friend who lives next to a letter carrier and someone moved a mailbox a few feet up a step where it had never been and that was it. he complained. i don’t recall the specifics but he might have got his union involved.
so op, find out what you had and if that is what you want, i would try to get it in as soon as possible or read the regs which are on line.
Guest User | 4 years and 5 months ago
Mailman told me to hang them on side of exterior stairs. That seems typical in a lot of houses.
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 5 months ago
they are a pain in the neck with their specs. i know this as i work on doors and have to put slots in.
i so far as i know, they have to be approved. if you have locking boxes, they will want one where the mail carrier opens a “master door” and puts the mail for each apt in their respective slot. that door they open will have to be able to accept their lock.