Where my parents live no one has numbers on the house. Most of the houses can't be seen from the road, and if they can, the numbers would have to be 2' High to be legible. Numbers are only on the mailbox at the road, and on a stone gate post if there is one.

Have you considered putting up a mail box and/or address number at the beginning of your access road...?

My friends, who live on acreage out in the middle of nowhere, only have the numbers on a sign out by their gate at the edge of the property. No numbers on the house at all.

Okay good to know there seems to be a general consensus! I guess I should have mentioned I have a slight complication as one gate will enter both my in law's and our property (we will be behind them). But we will have our own mailbox so I'll go with that! We will have a locked gate so their won't be unnanounced guests anyhow.

Where I live, the numbers are on the mailboxes by the road. Some houses can be seen from the road while others cannot but all of the mailboxes can!

I totally didn't even think about it until this thread... but I think it would just look weird to have numbers on my friend's rural house, lol. I hope to avoid numbers on my house when we build!

AFAIK, all rural areas now use Fire numbers as the I'D of the place with larger reflective numbers at the end of the driveway. Every place even ones with no house have a number

Actually my husband is a firefighter too! The funny thing about locked gates is it's actually quite simple to pull the pin on the motorized arm and push it open. Ha We won't really be locking it, rather it will remain shut (what I should have said).

Only our roof is visible from the road, but I made a plaque for the porch with the house numbers. It's purely decorative. There are also numbers on the mailbox, down at the road.

I grew up in the country, and we never had a number on our house. I don't think we were alone in having our house number only on our mailbox. Our front yard was over two acres and contained about a dozen mature oak trees, so no one could've read the number from the road.

Like mushcreek, our house can't be seen from the road but we were still required to have numbers on the house that complied with the local (?) ordinance in height and width of font. I think in a true emergency at night our mailbox numbers could be easily missed so would like to get something at the road that's illuminated or at least large and reflective at night.

Ours weren't a requirement; I just got around to putting them up 1-1/2 years after our final inspection. I think they're the icing on the cake, though.

Shelby, will your mailbox be at the shared gate? In that case, you could maybe have at the point where the drive diverges to the two houses, your number on a sign pointing to your house, and one for your in-laws.

Sounds like you should have a number on the mailbox on the road, and then again a number on a post or gate where the road splits between your house and your in-laws Or if both houses share the whole driveway, put numbers on the houses there.

Okay, Mr. Mush, that's just cute! I will totally consider something like that. :-)

I had a couple of winterized lakefront cottages several kilometres off the paved road accessible only by rough trails. No numbers, just occasional scrawled arrow signs at trail intersections that were regularly vandalized and/or removed. Outsiders, i.e., city folk, were not welcome. A neighbour had an accident one winter night and it took emergency personnel 2 1/2 hours to find his place. And the bodies.

"Just a question but if you have a locked gate barring entry, what would
happen if your house caught on fire when you were not at home? Would the
emergency personnel need to break down the gate?"

They have a tool for opening locked gates ...it's called the front bumper.

http://midwestfire.com/uploads/apparatus/161/IMG_6137-copy.jpg 

Worthy, that is really, truly awful. :-(

Please tell me that surveillance cameras were installed and that the responsible person(s) was (were) tried and convicted of manslaughter, at minimum. :-(

An accident, not a crime. My neighbour Larry H. drove his snowmobile carrying one passenger into his own dock at high speed. Fortunately, I hadn't gone up that weekend. But I got all the gruesome details from his ex, who handled the estate for his grief-stricken Mom.

And, in a TV twist, one of the young guys re-roofing my cottage the next summer knew all about the accident. His sister was dating the second victim and they had had an argument about his going up that weekend. So she stayed home and was subsequently wracked with guilt--if she had gone with him, the accident would never have happened, she said.

On our rural, woodsy, gravel road, everyone has the reflective 9-1-1 signs. (Our fire department sells them as fundraisers, but we needed it immediately and bought it from Amazon. Any numbers on the house are strictly decorative.

When we built The Cabbage two years ago and were regularly dealing with contractors, inspectors, porty-potty service people and a variety of individuals of varying degrees of intelligence, I was tempted to print out signs for every other driveway on our road saying THIS IS NOT 00000. I also considered creating a map/schematic of the road and each driveway and address, laminating it, and posting it out at the main road. I was amazed at how confused people can become on a dead-end road with five addresses.

I plan to create a metal sculpture of our house number for our driveway gate, but the 9-1-1 sign will remain in its highly visible position. The gate artwork will make me happy, the large, reflective sign will make me feel safe.

Mushcreek, my husband works at "Station 34" for his fire department so I'm loving your house number!

I'm liking the idea of a sign where our driveways fork pointing the appropriate direction with our addresses!

I would put number and street name on the gate leading to your house.

I've seen artsy fartsy people use a number like 5ive forty-2 and other combinations of numbers and words. Some are easy to read and some are very confusing.

Have the address highly visible at the street and artfully at the house. Just don't use words such as fifty two, you're not sure if it is 52 or 502.