Last Thursday, we finally got the piano into the house. From my perspective, I finally feel like I’ve moved in. I have some closets and stuff to do still, but this was the moment I’ve been awaiting for several years.
It isn’t mine - it belongs to a friend who is a coach/pianist. He left the school he’d been working out of last October, and offered me the chance to baby-sit his piano. Here we are, almost ten months later, and we have finally finished the renovations to the point where we could bring the piano in.
The piano is a Kawai RX-3 baby grand - it has kept its tuning quite well despite almost a year in storage. After a year or so of using a digital keyboard, I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to have a real instrument again at last.
The process was daunting - throughout the renovations, we had planned for that room to become the ‘studio’, so the joists beneath the room were all sistered to take the weight, and when the stairs got moved, our contractor spent a lot of time planning it so the piano could still come up the stairs. The one thing we hadn’t thought through - at the top of the stairs, the piano had to go into my daughter’s room and then come across the angle to get to the hallway. We had 19 3/8" of space and we needed 20" plus the mover’s blanket, so we had to remove the railing. Not that big a deal in the scheme of things, but if we’d realized it at the time, we wouldn’t have put the plugs in to cover the screws, and we wouldn’t have glued the bannisters in place.
The sight of those four gentlemen hauling the piano up the fifteen steps of the stairs was incredible! Apparently, the Cantonese equivalent of “One, two, THREE!” is something like “Na, Yi, SA!”, or at least that’s what it sounded like to me.
For those interested, here are some pictures at PhotoBucket.