One Of The Craziest Things We've Ever Done (Lately)

The Boy's brother called him last month and asked if he'd like to have his grandmother's piano.

The Boy asked me what I thought - mentioning all of the wonderful features of the piano, as well as noting that it was his grandmother's piano (three times). Of course, I said, we want the piano.

The hitch, of course, was that we needed to drive to Houston to collect said piano. 

That's how we found ourselves driving to Houston after getting up early to run six miles, then renting a UHaul truck, loading an extremely heavy piano (on a hot and humid day) and driving back to Dallas on the same day.

At some point, we realized that this was a slightly bigger project than we initially thought.

By the way, during a gas stop on said hot and humid day is not the appropriate time to have a discussion regarding who actually wanted the piano - the one who plays the piano (her) or the one who is related to the piano's original owner (him).

That discussion won't go anywhere that's productive. Trust me.

The next morning, before it got extremely hot and humid in Dallas, we contemplated how we - two scrawny runners - were going to unload an extremely heavy piano from a UHaul that had to be returned later that afternoon. And we checked: Returning the UHaul with a piano inside was not part of our rental agreement.

The Boy plotted and came up with a strategy that he called "SLOW AND STEADY."

SLOW AND STEADY got the piano out of the truck, down the ramp and to the edge of our entryway without injury to ourselves or the piano and, even more remarkably, without any cross words or ugly looks.

Since The Boy is good at doing things by himself and I am good at doing things by myself, but we are not good at doing things together, I consider this something of a miracle.

Christmas in July, you might say.

The hardest part was getting the piano both over the step into the house and the door threshhold. The Boy's mastery of fulcrums, leverage and brute force worked through that small problem. The door took minor damage in the process...but knowing the piano was in the house made that a non-factor.

From there, we merely needed to get the piano across the carpet and into its new home.

Did I mention the piano weighed over 600lb? And the wheels were questionable at best?

Though it took a while (the plan was SLOW AND STEADY, remember?), we finally got the piano where it will live until movers carry it out or the undertaker carries us out.

For those who might be interested ... I did a bit of research and learned that our new-to-us family piano is a 1927 Gulbransen upright piano.


PS - What do you think of the blog's facelift?