Before my husband and I met, he had a house designed that he wanted to someday build. When I came along, I made a couple of tweaks to the design, but overall, it is exactly how he imagined it. He doesn’t play the piano, but when he designed the house he had thought of putting a baby grand piano in his future home. He even had a spot selected.

I play the piano though, and when we got married we occasionally talked about this future baby grand piano. In the meantime, we purchased a used upright piano that has served me well for many years. I have loved this piano, played it a lot, taught my children and other’s how to play the piano, and just been grateful to own one.

We have gone and looked at pianos that the university was selling as they upgraded in their music departments. Still too expensive for us at the time. We have seen them come and go on places like Craig’s List and Facebook Marketplace. Some deals too good to be true, and they were, other deals were great, but we weren’t fast enough.

Just recently there have been several available, real live deals, but they also disappeared, or the owners decided they weren’t as eager to get rid of them as they had originally thought.

But then one baby grand piano came up for sale. My husband messaged, and they were eager to get it out of the living room as soon as possible. They had had a water leak and needed to do some repairs and upgrades and no one in the home played it anyway.

We drove to Anchorage and on the way, the kind people dropped the price by half, even though they knew we were already coming to get it. They had visions of moving companies and many people there to move this very heavy piano down a half flight of stairs and out across a snowy, icy yard to a big moving truck.

We showed up with my husband and 2 son-in-laws, and my daughters. My husband and son-in-laws were up for the challenge and had it taken apart and down the stairs in around 30 minutes. We got it out to a snow machine trailer, strapped it down, and we were off, headed home, grateful it wasn’t snowing.

Once home it was unloaded and left sitting on it’s side in the entryway for a couple of days so that we could get the equipment we needed, because this piano wasn’t going in our living room, it was going in our loft! 9 feet up on our loft floor we had the space we’d always dreamt of having a piano.

Now, this is where having a mostly finished, but not totally finished interior in our house came in handy. He was able to screw a 2×6 board down to the floor (unfinished) for the 2 – 14 foot microlam 2×12’s to rest against. They created a ramp up to the loft floor (railings aren’t in yet), that had 2×4’s screwed to the back side through the loft floor (not finished yet) to prevent them from moving uphill.

He then used a number of straps to hold it from twisting and so it would pull straight, one under it wrapped around a large wooden crossbeam, and one around the keyboard area. With a couple of come along’s attached to a post up on the loft floor, and secured to the piano with the straps, they were able to pull it up the ramp into the loft. The process was a bit scary for me, one of my daughters wouldn’t even watch. But about 2 hours and very little human lifting, and the piano was upstairs resting on the loft floor.

From there we got the legs installed back on the bottom and my piano was again sitting as it should. There were a few things broken in the pedal assembly that my husband set about gluing and fixing overnight, and today it is completely back together! It needs a good clean, and will need to be tuned. This will hopefully happen in about 2-4 weeks, after moving a piano you should allow the wood to adjust to the humidity in the new location.

This is my Christmas present this year, I am thrilled! This has been a long time coming. Most of the piano is only slightly out of tune as it is, and it’s fun to play it and to hear my daughter play it as well. Moving a piano is one of the hardest pieces of furniture that people move, but it can be done with a little bit of ingenuity and a lot of muscle. My husband did tell me, if we ever sell our house, the piano goes with it though!