Phase I: BEFORE - The Grand Toad

She is our house's namesake - Toadhall - our great room in the back. And the reason we bought this place.  

Let me set the scene: An expansive 42' x 23' room, mostly green plexiglass for walls. One pane has a smiley face scratched into it. Eleven foot high wooden ceilings with amazingly heavy support beams, a huge10' x 18' multiple-paned skylight in the middle.  
 
Where there are walls, they're covered with ugly brown exterior siding that matches the dark brown, cream and, yes, orange back porch you reach through double glass sliders from the kitchen. 


This almost 1,000 square foot space covers the whole back of the kitchen and house. You step off the colorful porch onto an unfinished plywood floor. No heat, no lighting, and in November as we walk through during the Broker's Open House, it's cold. A small trapdoor is cut into the floor near the far end.

Obviously, every potential buyer pauses, and stares, as they enter this room. There are two kinds of responses:

"What's this for?"  It's a whiny plaintive question.
"Is this a greenhouse?" ponders another.

or 

"Ohh, I could make this my  ...!"

Two professors see it as a huge library. Another sees a classroom. Yet another couple wants to hold political salons - it's Berkeley, after all. An antique car collector see two cars in here (or was it three?), with his shop at the far end. One artist drools over the gorgeous natural light. So do TJ and I. It is indeed an amazing space for making...anything.

As musicians and creative folk, we see the back porch expanded into a well-lit stage for band rehearsal, for dancing, and events to invite in our community. Many kinds of people. 

The house is ours! We put up warmly stained pine siding to match the ceiling. We add an insulating layer of greenhouse polycarbonate twin-wall glazing that hides the ugly plexiglass and makes the natural light sparkle. We add that stage, general and stage lighting, heat on its own thermostat...and a disco ball.                                                                              


Toadhall cabaret is born. 

The space gives rise to a year of storytelling shows (Toadhall Tellings), Rae's middle school graduation - not the party, the graduation itself - because the students want it here instead of their school auditorium. The "Toadhall Jazz Trio" rehearses here, and our neighborhood emergency preparedness meetings easily fit our whole 40 odd group. Years later, two dozen friends, TJ, and I convert the whole room into a pirate ship with rigging on those diagonal supports and a giant pirate chest. It's for Rae's surprise18th birthday party. 

And we hold a six-hour long Y2K neighborhood party where fifty-three old and new neighbors have time to rediscover each other.


Still, TJ and I move a sofa and chairs, some tables and a bookcase into one corner to enjoy the space ourselves when parties or events aren't happening. And often, we talk and plan side by side creative studios here. But it is always in the context of the great space. Then we sigh because it's far too expensive to heat on a regular basis. 

During the redesign of our home, it has been hard to let go of the grand capability this room has given us, and me - the most gregarious of us all. Along with cultivating many outrageous and playful memories for my family, she continues to coax me to give to our community, something that is a deep part of me. No house has ever offered me that breadth of opportunity. I think of Toadhall as my "Local Asset."

But I have changed her, as you'll see in the next post.

 Oh, that trapdoor?



 It opens to reveal steps....

...to a large 18' x 35' swimming pool below the plywood floor. She's an old pool house!