I’ve been hoping to get on to the next project but we’ve been stymied by the slow and ponderous rate of government. This time, the local post office.
It seems that the process of getting mail at a brand new address has multiple steps that are not known to the general public. First, you have to contact the local 911 office for your county to be provided an address. In Benton county, TN, you have to do it by snail mail because they do not want to field phone calls. You must wait several weeks before calling to check on the status of your address. If you’re not watching the junk file of the email address you provide, you may well miss the email they send and it will be eaten by the auto-delete in the junk folder. (whoops)
Once you have said address, you must visit your local post office, preferably with a print out of the email from the 911 address, or else the post office will need to make calls to confirm. You then fill out a change of address form as normal and then… wait some more.
The address must be inspected by the postal carrier of the route you will be on and by the postmaster of that office. No, they didn’t ride together to expedite the process. We are still waiting on the postmaster to approve the mailbox at the address so they can sign off on it.
From there, we are told, the process should take a couple of days for the data to finally be verified in the computer system for online address lookup. At THAT point, we can start directing mail and packages to our address, change our address on our various bank and store accounts, and begin the process of getting our drivers licenses and plates transferred.
Why do we have to wait to start changing those addresses? Because their systems have been built to verify addresses with the USPS database and will simply say that they can’t find an address to ship to. Handwritten addresses will be held at the post office, so we at least have that going for us.
We are currently waiting for an auger to be shipped-to-store so we can get started on the next few builds. In the meantime, we wanted to share our experience so that if you ever decide to build on raw land and need a new address for a home or business, you had some idea of the hoops you’ll need to jump through.
