We moved my sister's stuff into her new place on Saturday without injuring anybody or doing any major damage to the furniture. I did drop the old couch on my foot. Luckily, the foot was inside a steel-toed boot at the time. It gave my toes quite a scare though and they're still a bit jumpy whenever I walk near large pieces of furniture.
The only thing we had difficulty with was the piano at my parents' place. My sister chose to take that one instead of the one I had been pianositting for her since 2004. I guess it's mine now. (Sweet!) Anyway, the piano we moved was a standard upright. It was also a pain and a half to move.
We rolled it from its original spot in the kitchen - where it stood for more than twenty years and never moved more than a foot (except for the occasional cleaning) - to the garage door with little trouble, but plenty of squeaking. Halfway across the room, we gave each of the four tiny wheels a generous dose of oil, but it did nothing to stop the whining.
At the door, we had to negotiate two steps down to the garage. Fortunately, we had a plywood ramp my dad had built long ago, when a wheelchair-bound relative visited. With a heave, we slid the piano halfway across the threshold. When it stopped, it was balancing on its belly and the front wheels were hanging four inches above the ramp.
From the back, I did my best to lift and push the piano (which I conservatively estimated weighed a thousand times my body weight) onto the ramp. The instrument slid two inches, but didn't tilt.
Somewhere between the second and third pushes, I dreamt about how much simpler the move would have been if my sister and I had learned a more portable form of music, say, the violin or the kazoo.
The next lift and push tipped the piano onto the grade and brought a sharp cracking sound that cut my kazoo dream short. A face-to-the-floor inspection revealed a thin strip of wood had snapped underneath. We managed to load the piano onto the rental truck without breaking anything else and only hit a minor snag unloading it.
Somebody thought rolling the piano down the truck ramp would be easier if we put a dolly with large casters under the piano. And the person was right. It rolled much easier after we spent five minutes grimacing, groaning, struggling and straining to hoist the entire instrument four inches off the floor and onto the dolly.
I probably would have been more enthusiastic about how easily it rolled if I weren't the one volunteered to be the human roadblock stationed downhill of the musical equivalent of a Mack truck. Sheer willpower and footwear with a high coefficient of friction were the only things that kept me from becoming a piano crush victim (a fate usually reserved for cartoon characters).
From there, getting the piano into my sister's place was a relative cinch. Once we were done, I promised I would never move another piano ever again - an easy promise to keep, as long as I never do another move.
