A New Home!

By KELLY GODFREY of
The Toaster Museum Foundation

The towers of boxes of toasters are starting to collapse under their own weight. Why are they in boxes? Because we moved them all the way across the country, from Oregon to Virginia.

Why did we do that - move across the country with 100+ boxes of toasters (& 2 cats)? To find a new home for the toasters.

It was starting to seem as though they might just sit in our basement forever. We moved to Portland, Oregon from Seattle several years ago, just about the time when Portland real estate started to whip into a frenzy. We wanted to be located somewhere smaller and friendlier where we could afford to buy a house, and someplace with a university where I might be able to go back to school. To make a long story short, Portland didn't quite measure up to our expectations - although we bought a lovely house and I managed to spend a couple years at Portland State University.

So, now we're in Charlottesville, the "Best Small City in the South" according to Money Magazine, an incredibly friendly place with one of the top public universities in the nation - The University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, whose Monticello home is just outside of town.

We're now in the process of buying the wonderful old house pictured above. And we have big plans for the place! It's already zoned perfectly for what we want to do - have a cafe, live there, and especially open another toaster museum. It can't happen soon enough. It's a sad situation having the toasters in boxes. I can almost hear them crying out to be seen. The reality of the situation is that it's going to take awhile. The house is in pretty rough shape. There's major work to be done and we plan to do most of it ourselves. We just don't have the sort of budget it might take to attract the folks from This Old House to help us out. That might not stop us from putting together a proposal for them though. Just imagine....toaster display cases built by Norm Abram - wow!

We're dreaming big, but like the Rogers & Hammerstein song Happy Talkfrom South Pacific says: "You've got to have a dream. If you don't have a dream, how you gonna make a dream come true?"