Moving a piano with your futon mattress

During the summer this year, my wife and I had been going to open houses in our neighbourhood. Some houses really stand out more than others. There was one my wife really liked and I just saw all the things that needed to be fixed. It needed a lot of work. One thing it had was a really nice baby grand piano. I don’t play, but I have moved hundreds of them. Anyway, about two months later, I receive a phone call from a family who got themselves into a bad spot. They called me because their piano was stuck. I found out they were loading their own u-haul and the got everything done except a piano and they had to be out of the house in two hours because the new owners were moving in and this piano was wedged in the front entrance! I asked for the location and I knew this was the same house I had seen with my wife. I was actually finishing up for my day so I was able to be there in about 20 minutes! All of our moving crews where either still working or had gone home for the day. So I offered to go by myself if they were able to give me a hand. When I showed up, they had the piano on it’s side, completely wrapped in shrink wrap, and laying on top of a futon mattress which was indeed wedged in the door. These guys were just trying to muscle this very nice piano out of the house and the piano was winning the fight. I told them if they could follow my direction, we could work together to solve this. First we had to move the piano back where it started. Next, we replaced the legs and stood the piano back up so we could start from the begining. Then we removed all of the shrink wrap and then removed the lid from its hinges. Next we blanket wrapped the piano and then put shrink wrap back on. We then placed the piano onto the piano skid I brought, strapped it down and placed the whole thing onto a 4 wheel cart and rolled it out to the truck, up the ramp and into the U-Haul truck. After getting it all secure the whole family came out and said I was a God! It felt really good just to help them out of their predicament.

My advice to anyone moving a piano is to hire professional piano movers in the first place. That’s one piece of furniture your buddies are not equipped to move. Especially if they tell you to use a futon mattress to slide it on!