The Piano Predicament

My daughter and son visited my in-laws this past weekend.   My daughter has been enjoying playing their piano and they’ve offered it to us in the past but we’ve never accepted.   My mother has also offered her piano but we’ve declined as well because we didn’t have a spot we thought would work and we were having a lot of musical success with our keyboard which is much easier to move around.  

This time, after seeing a video my father-in-law took of my daughter we decided to take them up on their offer.   Yesterday I made a call to a mover we work with in our real estate business and today they went to my in-law’s town to pick up the piano.   We rearranged the bonus room on our second floor in preparation for the arrival of the piano this afternoon and I got advice from our music therapist on the best wall to place the piano for sound and tuning purposes.

They arrived and we ran into a problem—it wouldn’t make the turn up the stairs.   We have two stairs, the front being wood and the back being carpet.   They said the piano was so heavy it would mar the wood stairs badly and could even break them.   So we were stuck, literally, with a piano that could really only go one place—a wall in our basement my husband and I hadn’t wanted to put it.   That, our our mechanical room which we’re currently redoing to make it more of a room instead of a mechanical/stuff storage room.

We didn’t want to put it in the mechanical, soon to be game and workshop room, for multiple reasons.  This left the wall in the basement we weren’t keen on.   Only the movers couldn’t bring the piano down the outside of the house because the grass was wet and the moving cart would sink into the grass.    So now we have a piano sitting in a humid and hot garage, which is definitely not ideal.

We debated our options.   We could send the piano back to my in-laws or we could put it in the basement in the mechanical room or the wall of the basement main living area.   We dithered.    The movers left and the company owner called to make sure were weren’t mad at them, which we most certainly were not.   It wasn’t their fault the piano couldn’t make the turn up the stairs.   The owner was most gracious, offering to take the piano back to my in-laws for free.  

After some discussion my husband and I decided to put the piano in that spot we initially hadn’t wanted it, moving the pinball machine in the location now into the soon to be game room.    So now we’re off to get large sheets of plywood which we’ll use for the walls in the mechanical room later but for now will be the hard surface on which the piano will be rolled down the hill into our basement entrance doors.     All that will happen on Friday.

For now. my daughter doesn’t seem to mind the piano being in the garage—it hasn’t stopped her from playing it since it arrived.

The Big Boy Update:   My son came out of the bedroom after I put them to sleep for the night.  He was upset.   He said he didn’t want dad and me to become grandparents.   He didn’t want go grow up and he wanted someone to invent a pill to prevent parents from becoming grandparents.   I suggested he could work on that as an invention.   He went back to bed thinking about how he might solve this “problem”.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is doing very well in everything at school.  She’s excelling in fact, except for one area.   She isn’t reading braille with her fingers well.   She can type braille very well with the brailler, but her fingers aren’t recognizing the letters as she runs them over the paper.   So we have homework and they’re working on this one part as well at school.