Only you know if it will be worth the hassle!

It sounds like you are pretty unhappy with your current situation, so what do you have to lose?

You might want to check in with the post office also to determine if they will recognize the change. A county assigned address and a postal address are not necessarily the same thing.

' if UPS can't find us, it's possible EMS and Fire would have trouble too.'

I'm convinced!

Change it!

& be sure your house # is large, legible, easily spotted from the street, & glow-in-the-dark.

This is my free advice after a harrowing nighttime experience with an ambulance & an elderly friend whose 3" tarnished brass house # hadn't been improved upon in the past 50 years or so.

western_pa_luann : "It sounds like you are pretty unhappy with your current situation, so what do you have to lose?"

Time and energy :) The stress of dealing with changing a lot of vendors. That can be pretty efficient when I want to be, so I will scan in the letter from the county and email it out as most companies have emails on their invoices now.

rrah: Here the county assigns the street number, and she said she would inform the USPS of the change. I talked to my postmaster today and she said we should put in a "Change of Address" so it would be put in the database.

And she said don't worry because anything sent to the old address would be delivered - one of the advantages for living out in the country :)

sylviatexas: Yes I think I am convinced too. It's not just that we are on the wrong side of the road, but we should be on the other side of several neighbors too! Google Maps brings you right to our driveway, but UPS, Fedex etc don't seem to use GPS.

And nope numbers on the house don't help. Our house is up a 300 yard gravel driveway, so our mailbox is the main identifier.
Our current box is clearly marked with 5302, but as soon as they see 5307, the think they have gone to far and turn around.

If you change, be sure to ply your postman with appropriate inducements (eg brownies, cookies, whatever) to help ensure than your now mis-addressed mail still gets to you. The official USPO policy seems to be pretty pissy about not delivering mail once the official forwarding period expires, but good relations with your mailman can help get some of that mail delivered anyway. We did great until our guy retired, the new guy just stamped everything return to sender rather than bring it a few mailboxes down the road to our new place.

Change it ... it was probably a typo in the original paperwork.

5315 is right about in the middle of the sequence.

5307 __5315___ 5321

My parents had this issue -- they somehow ended up out of sequence with the neighbors. Also it was a dead end street and they numbered people in sequence going up one side then down the other -- so the 550s were across the street from the 400s -- it was really goofy.

They lived with it for about twenty years but the post office finally came through and resequenced (and actually renamed) the whole street. Their number went from 558 to 180 and the street and city names changed (zip stayed the same, oddly enough). Now the whole street is in the logical order you would expect with odds on one side and evens on the other.

And interestingly enough, mail sent to their old address (old number, street name and city) still gets delivered to the right place more than 10 years after the change. So I would go ahead and change your number and not worry too much about having to notify all your vendors -- I suspect your mail will keep going through no matter what address they use.

5309 is a prime number--seems like a golden opportunity.

What is the advantage of a prime number?

Well getting it changed was a lot easier than I thought it would be.
I emailed the lady at the county the form Wednesday evening, and before 11:00 the next day she had emailed me the official notification with our new address. We could not pick a number, she was to assign it.

I was expecting 5315 but we got 5311 which is fine.

I'll report back here after a few months to let everybody know how smoothly (or unsmoothly) things went.

Perhaps more important than the order of the numbers is that you have your address visibly posted at the street/mailbox/ and on the house too.

Where I live I have seen out of order numbers many times, as well as other odd address issues. ((Not in the planned subdivisions, but in the areas with sporadic independent homes built over time))

lafdr

"What is the advantage of a prime number?"

Primes have good geek cred. My favorite Harris cartoon has a Veronese gentleman standing in front of a door with the address 112358 and the caption "This must be Fibonacci's"

Some of us are just weird.

Here is a link that might be useful: cartoon

lafdr - As I said our mailbox was clearly marked. If 1 or 2 people couldn't find us I wouldn't worry. But since it happens every time we get a new UPS/Fedex Driver it happens a lot. I have had to driver to the Fedex Distribution center 30 miles away because the Fedex Driver had made two attempts and couldn't find us.

When you are driving up a state road looking for 5302, and you pass 5301, 5303, 5305 5307 and there are no houses across the street, you think you have missed it. And since we are 300 yards and out of sight from the road, it would be hard to flag down an ambulance.

I say go for it. But perhaps keep both numbers on the mailbox and address for a few years :)
Happy Thanksgiving!
lafdr

So far so good.

I went to the Post Office on the Monday after I got the email confirmation, and they said "Oh yeah, we got the email from the county, we are good.. the carrier knows. Don't worry, any mail coming to 5302 will still get to you." I did submit a forwarding order so that major companies will get our new address from the USPS database. I will update others.

We got a Fedex package this week addressed to our new number, and he found us with no problem.

Google maps had us placed wrong, but I reported it and they corrected it quickly.

So far the only company to give me a hard time is Comcast (which shouldn't surprise me). I did a chat online and the customer service rep insisted that I needed to go to my nearest service center and change it in person. I have had to go there before and it's brutal. They are severely understaffed and it's always a long wait in line. I complained to the CSR that this was ridiculous and I should be able to fax in the change, but she insisted. So I said "screw it", I get ebills anyhow.

The unintended benefit is that we are getting lots of welcome to the neighborhood coupons which include 15% off at Lowes... which is one of our favorite stores!

Wow, if I had know if was going to be this easy, I would have done it when we first bought the house.

I need to let our mortgage company know, but I have been fighting them for several months over a missing mortgage payment, and don't want to do anything until they fix it.