Piano Tuning

Monday night we had the Piano Tuner come over to tune our new/used piano. It was quite an adventure!!! First of all, he tightened some pins and screws and fixed my damper pedal. Then, as he was testing the keys, a little brown knob fell out from among the hammer heads and rolled across the keys. Mathew & I thought it was a piece of wood, but the tuner said "Well, that's as far as we'll go here. Time to take it apart!" It turned out, it was a piece of DOG FOOD! So he pried off all the keys from the keyboard and laid them out on a towel! I had never seen that done before! Turns out, it's quite common he said.

Look at all that dog food! We got out our vaccuum and proceeded to vaccuum up all that dog food and straw (the people from whom we bought the piano have two house dogs, so that's where the dog food came from)


This is how much we got (about 5 cups I suppose). Turns out, a mouse had made his house in our piano before we bought it, and carried the dog food up piece by piece by piece. (Along with a little straw) There were some chew marks on the inside wood, but not enough to harm anything. Thankfully, we didn't find the mouse!!! ha ha He was long gone with all the moving, and it was nice to know we don't have any in our house now (otherwise we would've found him) I guess it's rather common for him to find piano-mouse houses. But it was quite hilarious!

After putting the piano all back together again, he tuned it. It hasn't been tuned in about 6 years, so was a 1/2 step out of tune (that is ALOT in piano terms). Since it was so out of whack, he only tuned it up part of the way (A330) so as to not break the strings. Then, we will get it re-tuned in a couple months to bring it up farther....eventually being in tune (A440). Hopefully we don't find another mouse house!!!!! The piano sounds so much better now! It's lovely!