June 11, 2005 ~ Remarkably, No Fatalities
Saturday.
Okay, so, there's a piano in our living room. An antique piano. A free antique piano. In beautiful condition, except for needing a little tuning. How did it get there? Well, see, that was the catch. We had to move it ourselves.
"Sure!" We thought. "No problem! It's a free piano!" Oh the trouble our naiveté gets us into...
Morgan and I really want to raise our children in a house filled with music, a house where they can learn to play an instrument or two. So when I saw the freecycle advertisement for a free antique paino, great shape, I jumped on it. She said it had been a player piano, but her parents had converted it. She just didn't play it anymore, and wanted it to go somewhere where it would be played. Just needed a little tuning.
We had Morgan, our friend Sloan, our friend Joel and his pick up truck... a pregnant lady who can't lift anything... and. Um. Some rope? Right. No problem. How heavy can a piano be?
Answer: Heavy. Bone-crushingly, back-breakingly, truck-damagingly heavy. The thing must have weighed 500 pounds. And that is a conservative estimate.
The lady giving it away thankfully had a dolly. In her living room, with many grunts and groans, the guys got it loaded onto the dolly and out the front door.
We all looked at the five steep steps down from her porch. And looked at the piano. And looked at the five steep steps down from her porch. Hmm.
"How about we... um... try to slide it down the steps?" said Morgan doubtfully.
"Uh. Yeah," said Sloan. "You two stand back there; I'll stand in front to slow it."
"Sloan! If they can't hold it back, you'll be crushed!" I protested.
We decided that the four of us would stand to either side, trying to hold it back and ease it down the stairs. Somehow, we managed it, without any fatalities.
The guys loaded the piano (for some reason I keep accidentally typing "paino." Pain-o. Hmm. Freudian slip?) back on the dolly and wheeled it down the front walk, but when we neared the end of the walk we realized that the dolly was cracking in two. The piano had broken the dolly. The dolly, the thing that was designed for the transport of heavy things. Right. Okay. Sorry about that...
And then we looked at the truck. And the approximately three feet that we'd have to lift the piano to get it in the truck. We'd barely managed the 5 inches required for loading onto the dolly. How in the world...?
They decided to have two guys lift one end while the other braced the back. They would lift it high enough to rest it on the tailgate. "Um. Do you think the tailgate will stand up to that?" I asked hesitantly.
"Hopefully."
lift lift lift oh dear god lift lift lift.
In that moment, I thought about a scene from a movie where an upright piano went careening down a street. Until that precise moment, while I stood there praying that my husband wouldn't be crushed in a freak piano accident, I had not realized how incredibly dangerous an unfettered and escaped run-away piano would be.
lift lift lift, and, finally. They had it. They quickly changed positions and pushed it further into the bed until its center of gravity shifted and finally settled into the bed (at which point Morgan screamed, for his finger was momentarily caught between the piano and one of its casters. It's purple now, but we don't think it's going to fall off.)
It was at that moment that the skies opened and it started pouring. We quickly covered it with the tarp we'd brought, and I started tying it in with a massive amount of rope.
We took back streets across town, not daring to take the interstate since the tailgate wouldn't close. Sloan and I followed in the Corolla, watching through the downpour for any signs of movement. Much to our amazement, the piano stayed completely still. (Much to our relief, for, following, we were having visions of the piano falling out and crushing us in the car).
And the adventure of moving the piano into our house, in the rain, this time without a dolly, was also a tale of great strife and struggle, but, suffice it to say, it is now in our living room.
A piano. In our living room. A huge freaking heavy piano. We can never move again.
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