20) Cardboard Mailbox

A few months ago I saw this great cardboard mailbox on Pinterest from a blog called ikat bag (http://www.ikatbag.com/2008/07/whats-in-box.html) and have been dying to make one for the girls. Yesterday we got some new shoes in the mail and they came in the perfect box! So this morning using the cardboard box that the shoes were delivered in and parts from the two shoe boxes I made a great little cardboard mailbox that the Bee and Bean have loved playing with. Inspired by yesterday's post on Tinkerlab (http://tinkerlab.com/2011/09/playful-learning-blog-tour-mail-center-and-giveaway/) I cut some paper for the Bee to write some postcards while I built the mailbox. She had a great time drawing and telling me all about the letters she was writing to her cousins. I also gave her some envelopes and small colored post-its so she could draw her own stamp and put it on her envelopes. Here is how I made the mailbox:



First I used the larger box (the white shoes.com one) and reinforced the seems with packing tape and left it to stand vertically. The box comes to about my knee. The I used the bottom from one of the smaller shoe boxes and took it apart so that it was flat.



Then leaving the top flaps of the large box up I bent the smaller box and placed on top of the larger box to create the top of the mailbox. I then used sciscors to round the corners of the two side flaps so that they would fit in under the space of the smaller box. I also used a pair of sciscors to cut a mail slot in the front of the smaller box. After I got everything in place and trimmed off any extra cardboard I used a heavy duty packing tape to keep eveything together.




Finally using a strip of cardboard from one of the other boxes I made a handle that I attached to the front flap so the girls can open and close the mailbox. Then to make sure they could get their mail back out I used an exacto knife to cut a square door along the bottom.