Sometimes it’s nice to have a little closure.

I don’t know what I was really thinking, but a few years ago I bought an upright piano on the cheap. I played a little as a kid and I think I thought I was going to have the time to take it up again. There were a few broken keys and it was terribly out of tune, but I thought it would be a fun project.

So, I and the rest of the Latitude fellas first carted the piano into the Monticello house a few years back. I had a bout of enthusiasm and I got some tuning wrenches from my buddy Ray and quickly tuned half the piano. My attention to it waned and we were left with a piano that was half in tune, half out of tune, so you really could only play one half at one time.

Then we moved on to the King St house. We loaded it in the pick up truck again and muscled it into the house.  Broke a few more keys driving across town among other wear and tear issues. After sitting in our living room at King St for over a year collecting dust, Joey had a piano tuner come and offer his opinion, which basically was, “fat chance trying to save this.”

So, we took some sledgehammers and sawzalls to it and we’ve been left with the carcass, the keys and the sound board, for over a year. Spontaneously, we thought wouldn’t it be great if we could somehow incorporate it into our house. So, we lugged the soundboard into the truck one last time and drove it down the street. It’s still quite heavy, but nothing like moving the whole piano.

Originally, we thought it would be great to have it on a wall in our living room, but then quickly realized we would be driven bonkers by kids banging on it all the time.  So, we settled on framing it into the 1st floor half bath, which is out of the way and has a door.  We thought it would be this great fantastical and surprising moment to walk into the bathroom and see the giant sound board. An added bonus is the back half faces into our mudroom nook, so we are going to use the shape of it to inform the shapes of the built in cubbies.