Piano Update #7
Dec. 15th, 2008 09:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kv0925So when last we left the piano, some six months ago (Update 6 here), I'd gotten pretty much everything stripped of paint and more or less down to the bare wood. All that's really left in that respect are the legs, which are carved pretty finely and hence scare me with all their nooks and crannies. Otherwise I really haven't touched the thing (aside from playing it, anyway!) since June. Until he past few weeks anyway, when I decided I should finally make some more progress!
As a tinkerer on the piano (read: I know my chord forms and can play some pretty stuff that I make up on the spot and could probably never play again), I find that pianos sound better with the damper pedal down. That's the one that lifts all the dampers off the strings and lets all the notes sustain, and I just find that to be a much more satisfying sound when you don't really know how to play the thing. :) All of which is a long way to say I reinstalled the pedals this weekend!
Complete with pretty bright new red felt!
I don't feel like I have the time or patience right now to really apply a new finish to the whole piano, so for now I'm just getting things down to the wood, more or less, and since it's very pretty wood I'm leaving it at that for now. Maybe in a year or two I'll tear it apart again and actually apply some sort of varnish and/or sealant. Maybe by then I'll have finally figured out if I want to stain it or not! As long as it looks and sounds decent, I'm happy enough at the moment. So there.
As a reminder and by way of comparison, you can kinda-sorta see the dingy pedals and ugly (chipped and peeling) paint that was on the thing in this before shot:
Also an interesting find. While I was monkeying around underneath the thing, installing the pedal lyre and adjusting the pushrods and tightening various other screws, I found this bit of graffiti:
There's no telling how recently in the instrument's 81 years of existence this was pencilled on, but I'd like to imagine some little girl did it while playing around under the piano at church one day in 1935 or so. :)
While I'm at it, I thought I may as well also update the tv-over-fireplace project. We went from this:
To this, at the last update:
And now it looks like this:
I think the mantel came out quite well on the cheap, though it (too) isn't done yet. I have a few more pieces of wood to add to the sides to finish it, and then I'll paint it. There's also some touch-up paint and carpentry work to do here and there around the area, but it's getting there. These things just take me forever, apparently. Good thing we're all young yet. :)
As a tinkerer on the piano (read: I know my chord forms and can play some pretty stuff that I make up on the spot and could probably never play again), I find that pianos sound better with the damper pedal down. That's the one that lifts all the dampers off the strings and lets all the notes sustain, and I just find that to be a much more satisfying sound when you don't really know how to play the thing. :) All of which is a long way to say I reinstalled the pedals this weekend!
Complete with pretty bright new red felt!
I don't feel like I have the time or patience right now to really apply a new finish to the whole piano, so for now I'm just getting things down to the wood, more or less, and since it's very pretty wood I'm leaving it at that for now. Maybe in a year or two I'll tear it apart again and actually apply some sort of varnish and/or sealant. Maybe by then I'll have finally figured out if I want to stain it or not! As long as it looks and sounds decent, I'm happy enough at the moment. So there.
As a reminder and by way of comparison, you can kinda-sorta see the dingy pedals and ugly (chipped and peeling) paint that was on the thing in this before shot:
Also an interesting find. While I was monkeying around underneath the thing, installing the pedal lyre and adjusting the pushrods and tightening various other screws, I found this bit of graffiti:
There's no telling how recently in the instrument's 81 years of existence this was pencilled on, but I'd like to imagine some little girl did it while playing around under the piano at church one day in 1935 or so. :)
While I'm at it, I thought I may as well also update the tv-over-fireplace project. We went from this:
To this, at the last update:
And now it looks like this:
I think the mantel came out quite well on the cheap, though it (too) isn't done yet. I have a few more pieces of wood to add to the sides to finish it, and then I'll paint it. There's also some touch-up paint and carpentry work to do here and there around the area, but it's getting there. These things just take me forever, apparently. Good thing we're all young yet. :)
