Adios, unwanted piano!

When we did the final walk-through a week before closing on our house, the former owner tried to sell us their piano. We politely declined. Imagine our surprise, then, when we discovered it still sitting there in our hallway.

I should mention that we didn't reject the piano because we are piano-haters.  We are actually piano-lovers. Well, Rick is a piano-lover, and I love to listen to Rick the piano-lover play the piano he loves. (Say that 5 times fast.) But Rick has a really nice keyboard that we saved up for a few years ago, and he eventually would like to own a baby grand. So it just didn't make sense to buy this one, have it serve no function other than a dust-collector, and then have to move it ourselves a few years down the line when we got tired of not dusting it looking at it.

But we ended up with it anyway. Good thing we didn't pay to have it still sitting there in our hallway, right? :)

Anyway, since we didn't want it, we decided to put it on Craigslist for free, where it was listed for approximately four months. We had probably 20 people express interest in "coming to pick it up." Of the 20, zero showed up, and zero called or emailed to say they had changed their mind. In the meantime, Rick began teaching himself how to tune pianos using our unwanted house guest and Gingerbread began teaching herself how to launch her kitty self from the top of the staircase to the piano to the floor instead of going down the stairs properly. Apparently she has such a busy schedule that she must utilize shortcuts like that.

Finally, this past weekend, someone called on Saturday morning and said they'd be here by 4pm that afternoon. I fully intended to never meet them (we didn't have a good follow-through track record...) but I was happily proven wrong when they did show up, and the two of them carried it out of the house themselves. I offered to help, but they declined when I flexed my arm muscles. Apparently I don't have much in the way of arm muscles.

(I captured this iconic moment through the window so as to minimize my appearance of being creepy. Even though they probably already thought I was creepy what with the arm-flexing and all.)

Bye-bye, piano.

Rick asked them what they were going to do with it, and their answer was much more interesting than we  expected: they planned to turn it into a desk! Apparently, they have a business of doing that and then selling them. I was pretty excited, because I love the idea of completely repurposing stuff. And I was even more excited when I walked back into the house and had a completely piano-less hallway.

Gingerbread, however, is in mourning. She has taken up vigil until she has fully passed through the seven stages of grief. Or...until she gets distracted by some speck of nothing that she sees float by.

Has anyone ever seen a piano repurposed? (I'm curious now!)