Piano Mayhem

Uh Oh.

My piano had an annoying click on the middle E–a very common note to be played in EVERY lesson.  So I finally decided to open the piano lid and see if I could fix it.  I know, I know… it’s never that easy.  I should have known that.  But I looked any way.

Sure enough, I couldn’t figure out what the click was coming from (and neither could Tim–I thought maybe two minds were better than one!) so I closed it back up.  It got kind of stuck as we closed it, but I didn’t think much of it.  So I repositioned all of my decorations on the piano and started playing for fun.  It wasn’t long before I noticed there were a bunch of keys near the low end of the keyboard that weren’t sounding.  Or at least not sounding right.

Sigh.

I took all the stuff BACK off the piano and opened it back up again.

Uh oh.

Now I notice there is a broken hammer head stuck down next to the keys next to it.   WHAT?!  How did that happen!?

Well, apparently there is a trick to closing the piano carefully… that I didn’t do.  You would think that after owning the piano for so many years I wouldn’t have made the mistake… See the piano?  Notice the little leg on the far left?  Ok, that leg holds the lid open…

Right.  Now, when you close the lid you should tuck the leg back up inside and close slowly.  Which I did.

But when I closed it the leg swung back down and well… you can see what happened.  (On a side note, I discovered later that it swung back down because the screw was too loose.  I have since corrected this problem… )

So the piano guy was out here bright and early this morning fixing the problem.  Which actually wasn’t all bad, because the piano was in DIRE need of a good tuning as well, so he was able to do that as well.  I admit I had been putting off the tuning because I wasn’t sure when we were going to be moving and I know I’ll have to get it re-tuned after we move, but it looks like it will be a good chunk of months longer at the LEAST.

So, to recap.  Don’t try to fix a piano yourself.  Be careful to put the leg back up when closing the lid.  Good ultimately came because of having to get it fixed.  🙂