Look Mom, No Cavities!

Mom gave us the baby grand piano about ten years ago, when she and Keith moved to a smaller rental house in Bellingham. We had a nice spacious six-bedroom house at the time and so we were thrilled to have it in our living room. The boys were taking piano lessons from their Grandma Shirley, so it sure seemed convenient. I was so naive.

There was just one small problem: our living room was on the upper floor of a two-storey, mid-level entry house and there was no way for the piano movers to muscle it up the stairs. My good friend, Doug Smith, had a heavy-duty forklift that he was generously willing to drive to our house so that he could hoist the piano in a sling, over the upper floor deck railing, so we could take it through the patio sliding doors into the living room. It was a very windy day when we were able to finally coordinate movers and piano tuners, and Doug had to carefully elevate the piano between power lines suspended above our deck. Needless to say, the pucker factor was very high.

For the next five years, we had a nice piano in our house. But the boys grew up and started to move away from home, and we decided to downsize. We decided to move to Portland into a small, three-bedroom house. We had to reverse the piano moving process, and Doug was kind enough again to bring the forklift on city streets up the steep hill to our house to lift the piano off the deck. Piano movers strapped the piano to a skid board and we hauled it to Portland in a 24-ft U-Haul truck. Our new house was also on a hill, so the local piano movers had to negotiate a steep driveway and seven steps up to our front porch. I had to remove the wrought-iron railing so they could swing it around two corners to get it in the living room. I could not bear to watch this time, but the move came off without a hitch, because they quickly had the piano re-assembled.

All was fine for the next four and a half years. When Carlin came to live with us in Portland, while he went to school at Multnomah Bible College, we enjoyed listening to him play. We stipulated that he could have free room and board as long as he played the piano for us and he willingly obliged. Since Carlin is the only one of our sons to maintain an interest in playing, we offered him the piano when he was ready to settle down. But we decided to move to New Zealand before Carlin finished college and had a place of his own.


So we strapped the piano to another skid board (I had to buy the skid board and straps this time), hired piano movers to haul it out of the house, down the stairs and up the driveway where they hoisted it up into the waiting 20-ft cargo container, ready for shipping by slow boat to Auckland via Singapore (that's another long story). When the cargo container finally arrived in New Zealand, we had found a rental house to live in, also down a steep driveway with about six steps up to our front door and a right angle corner to negotiate.

Once our cargo container arrived, we hired a team of three house movers with strong backs to do the heavy lifting for us. In the middle of all of this chaos, we had to have a customs official from the Ministry of Forestry and Agriculture come and witness the opening of the container so he could make a quarantine inspection of our household goods. The young, strong movers used their muscles and brains to set up a ramp to get the entire household and piano moved into the house in less than three hours.

Then I had to contact a piano shop to find a tuner who could re-assemble the pieces, and tune the piano in its new climate on the other side of the planet. The piano shop put me in contact with William Lo, a sub-contractor with limited English speaking skills, but able and willing to do the work. After a few miscommunications, his team of two scrawny laborers came to the house and put the piano back together. I couldn't watch. Then William came to our house one evening to tune it. After that he offered to fix the ivories that had been chipped or previously replaced with poorly matching synthetics. So a few nights later, William came to our house, retracted the keyboard and took 16 keys (still attached to their hammers) in a cardboard box back to his shop. Today, he came to deliver the repaired keys. It looks great!

The only way I can justify dragging this piano all over the world is if I try once again to learn how to play it. I've talked about it several times, but now that we have clean, white piano keys, I no longer have any good excuses. So thanks to you, Mom, for your generous gift. It's been sheer pleasure so far.

Curt