I’d been wanting a Grandmother clock (slightly shorter) for ages but didn’t want to pay the price of a new one. I’d read used ones go for far less, because of the transport issues, but after looking for months for one to come up, bought a cuckoo clock instead.
Tried this. I heard the sound of glass breaking, ran outside to check my car…and there was a second piano in the backseat.
There are quite a few stories about “Pianos in the Park” and variations thereof, and all of them have one thing in common, which is not surprising, and that thing is vandalism.
When I moved from my apartment to my wife’s house, all my furniture went into storage (including my Everett console piano which kaylasmom and I had bought refurbished in about 1986 then shipped from Hawaii to California in 1989). This past May, when Joan died, I awarded the piano to Kayla’s best friend for a supportive post on FB, with the understanding that the BF’s mother would come and get it before July 9, when I had to pack everything out of storage.
Welp, she backed out on the 6th, so Kayla got on the phone and found the music director from a local church to take it off our hands on the 7th. Not really easy to load onto his pickup, but we made it.
Depending on condition, you can’t even give them away for free. I was looking at free pianos for a while, until I learned that free pianos usually aren’t worth the price. A free piano hasn’t been maintained, probably for decades. To service it would probably cost more than a used, already working piano. Unless you know any would-be piano restorers looking to practice their skill, I would reconsider that option. Honestly burning the wood and selling the metal for scrap would probably be the most financially beneficial option.
And if you have a piano and don’t want it to suffer this fate, get it tuned every couple years and have it regularly inspected and maintained as needed. And keep it clean! (I’ve watched some piano restoration videos on Youtube and apparently mice like to nest in them.)
They say pianos improve like guitars do (the wood in the soundboard dries and ages, is the main mechanism, and people prefer that to the sound of newer wood), but only for so long. Eventually the metal gets corroded or the structural wood starts to break or decay, and it stops being worth the repairs. I’ve heard 60 years mentioned as the expected lifetime of a piano.
As someone who’s just now trying to learn piano, but with a decent amount of experience as a guitarist, this surprised me. The most expensive, prized guitars (other than those that once belonged to celebrities) are Martins built in the 1930s. I figured a decent brand name piano from that time would be similarly valuable, and worth the expense of restoration. But that is not so, for the most part.
I was also surprised to hear that piano strings are expected to last the life of the piano. As a guitarist, I figured they needed to be changed every once in a while, if obviously not as often as a guitar’s strings need replaced.
I mean, Mozart’s and Beethoven’s pianos are still around, so at least some old pianos are worth restoring and maintaining for centuries. But most apparently aren’t.
(Oh, and I went ahead and bought a Yamaha digital piano to start learning on. It’s cheap, light, I can play with headphones without keeping my family awake at night, but I still do dream of getting a nice upright acoustic one day. But I suspect whatever demand there used to be for old, free pianos mostly died with the advent of digital pianos.)
Our free piano so far seems to be in good condition. The only caveat is that it didn’t hold its initial tuning very long. I am hopeful that it will hold better on subsequent tunings.
I basically had to do a combination of arm-twisting and abject begging to get a neighbor to take our old upright for his church when my dad passed away.
This would be more fun… I found this piano about a quarter mile from the road a few years back. We have the annual street piano thing here, but none with such a view.
I wonder if someone finally kicked or pushed that piano over the edge, just to enjoy the destruction and debris.
We got rid of the wife’s upright piano a few years a go and it wasn’t easy. It was given to her and her siblings by their grandmother when they were kids. We dragged that thing out to the curb and back several times as she just couldn’t let it go. Finally, we put a “Free” sign on it and within a day someone wanted it for her granddaughter. But we had to drag it back in and out one more time, since grammy couldn’t get anyone to move it for several days and rain was on the way. Thank god that thig is gone!
It was still there the next year. The rain did it no favors, and some trail maintenance organization came and clean up the soggy wreck.
Make sure you don’t hire Laurel and Hardy to do it!!!
In South St. Louis, they fill the back seat with zucchini!
Yikes – so do I
Back as a small boy in the late 60s at a Boy Scout fundraising event I watched a piano smashing competition. Each team were given a piano and selection of sledgehammers. The noise was magnificent.
I bet Blixa Bargeld recorded it and that was the first Einstürzende Neubauten album.
I’ve always wanted a grandfather clock. For all the posters wishing to get rid of yours, I wish I was in your neck of the woods – I’d happily take them off your hands.
They were the Beavis and Butthead of the 1930s!
An elderly cousin on my mom’s side passed away earlier this year, and the first estate sale wrapped up yesterday. She had several grandfather clocks (none of them terrible old; apparently they were some sort of bank giveaway in the '50s or so); it will be interesting to see if they show up in the next estate sale.
Something else that no one wants: headboards. I have a solid wood headboard (no frame – it went missing during one of the moves) taking up space in my garage. I could probably get a donation place to take the entire suite of furniture, but I’m still using the other pieces. (Besides, they’re not in good condition compared to the headboard.) I had thought about putting it at the curb with a big FREE sign this weekend, since the neighborhood yard sale is tomorrow, but I don’t have the energy to haul it out there at 7 AM.
Solid wood headboards can be used for furniture-building projects. I bet if you post to craigslist or similar you can find somebody to take it off your hands.
Eons ago, my folks had a junky old piano (it was painted light green - classy, right) and when they decided it needed to go, Dad got it out into the alley and gave all the neighborhood kids hammers to beat the crap out of it. I assume it went into the garbage, or maybe he borrowed a truck and took the remains to the dump. It was over 50 years ago, so memory is hazy…