This meme made me laugh, as it exactly describes me back in 2020, when I bought a piano.
I’d been slowly searching for the right piano – an upright, not too expensive incase I want to modify it (highly likely) and in good condition. One eventually came up for auction from a deceased estate sale, a 1930s Kemble piano. I checked it out – it played well & sounded lovely. The wood was also beautiful matched-grain, which I interpreted as meaning this particular piano had been made with care and not generically mass produced.
I won the auction, fending off two other vaguely interested people… and I still only paid NZ$250 for it! Thats US$149 – less than the price of some plugins lol. Anyway, I knew I had to move the piano on the day of the auction, so I rented a small furniture-moving truck which had a hydraulic lift on the back of it. At the auction house, the guys there helped me carefully wheel the piano out of the shop, and onto the trucks rear tray, lifted it up & rolled it into the rear of the truck, tied it down, all good!
Now the real challenge: my house is up a steep drive, so I tied the piano down very well, with ratchet cargo strops. But I was still thinking about how I was going to get the piano safely off the truck. And then up the zig zag path and into my lounge. From A to B, with a vertical height of one story of my house, maybe 3m/12foot at a gentle incline. But uphill all the way, with four turns.
How would you do it?
Anyone I knew locally who might help was away at work, so I either had to wait until that evening. Or find a way to do it by myself. I became determined to find a way, but with the weight of it & the angled path I couldn’t ‘wing’ it like the guy in the meme above as the piano weighed too much.
First problem to solve was getting it off the truck, so I could go return the truck to the rental company. I rolled the piano on to the lift, and lowered it slowly, and then carefully rolled it off and on to flat ground by the garage. I used a tie down to secure it the piano to the garage & returned the truck.
By the time I got back I had an idea in mind. A simple reality check: could I lift one end of the piano & move it, at all? Like even just an inch? I placed blocks of wood behind the wheels, so it couldn’t roll backward at all. And I bent my knees, grabbed one end of the piano & lifted it. I put the piano down. Phew! OK. That was doable.
Next I got a sack-barrow and slid it under one end of the piano. I slowly lifted the other end and with gentle forward motion the piano moved in the direction I was pushing a little bit, like 6 inches! The sack barrow protected the bottom of the piano from friction at the uphill end. And as long as I put the piano down again gently, there was no shock or sudden movement invovled at all. Phew! OK. I stretched & walked around a bit. And then I did it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. Each time fully resting between lifts, taking breaks and doing something else for ten minutes etc…
All up, it took me about three hours to move the piano from the garage into my lounge.
At no time did I move it more than six inches in one go. And weirdly I wasn’t particularly tired or sore afterwards. I definitely could not sustain ‘carrying’ the piano at all. Even two people would really have to exert themselves, to lift & carry the full weight of the piano up the path. My method was not more efficient, but it did work!
By going very slowly and steadily over what might seem like an unreasonable amount of time, I essentially broke a seemingly impossible task down into such small steps they were feasible. And the entire larger project could be achieved. Sustainable progress. That’s the metaphor!
The reason for reminiscing about pianos?
Don’t worry, its not my Kemble piano… It was donated, thanks Mel!
Now the fun begins…