Can you find my home?

"There's no place like home" – Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz

It seems no one can find our house. We live at an intersection of D- (a side road) and M- (a main road). The driveway to our house is on D-. Our front door faces M- across our lawn so we have an M- street address. Our mailbox is on a pole shared with our neighbor adjacent to his driveway on M-. Inevitably people see our mailbox and go up our neighbor’s driveway to his house. We’ve had UPS leave our packages on his stoop. Nothing seems to help. We have giant glow-in-the-dark House Letters on a tree in our yard. We have a large house number near the door of our house.

But everyone looks at the mailbox. So we added a giant foam hand beneath our mailbox with a finger pointing to our house. Still we had company come for dinner last week, see the finger, and still go to the wrong house. We can laugh at that. Less funny is the misdirected packages. Not at all funny would be EMTs going to the wrong house after I call 9-1-1.

Sometimes having a visible house number is not enough. In Westchester County we used to have unnamed, private roads that people lived on. With 9-1-1 every road was named and every house numbered. Sometimes an address makes no sense. The New York Times story, Nice Address, but Where Is It Really?, describes the problem in Manhattan of “vanity” addresses that use an address number out of sequence or use the address of the “swankier” street around the corner. In Tokyo the story says, house number 1 used to be the first house built on a street, #2 the second, and so on. There was no physical ordering of the house numbers so #12 could be anywhere along a street.

Bottom Line

Put yourself in the shoes of the ambulance or EMT who is trying to find your house. On a dark moonless night, go stand in the street see if anything marks your house as identifiable. Better yet, drive by in a car at night with lights on and see if you can find the house number – are the numbers on the mailbox legible? Can the numbers be seen driving in both directions? If not put new, larger, numbers on your house and mailbox. The numbers on your house or door need to be lit by the porch light or other house light.

If you have a sidewalk curb, spraypaint your house number onto the curb.