If you give a mouse a piano...

…you may need to call "the potentate of totin’ freight"

A friend of mine has frequently referred to “the bent nail theory of remodeling.” It goes like this: You find a bent nail in the door trim. As you try to remove it, you crack the trim. You go to replace the trim board, and you can’t find a matching style, so you realize you have to replace all the trim in the room. As you look at the trim you realize a floor board is loose, which turns out to be because there’s a minor leak underneath from the faucet. One you-might-as-well repair after another, and the next thing you know, you’re adding on a room.

This theory apparently holds true with the purchase of a piano.

We have wood floors in most of our house, and we’ve been meaning to refinish them for a while. Sometime before Christmas we agreed it was (past) time and we would schedule it for spring or summer when we could easily escape to the cottage and avoid the mess. When we purchased the new piano, this was in my mind. As we were arranging the delivery I asked the piano lady what precautions I should take with the piano during the refinishing. “You can’t refinish floors with that instrument in the house! The dust will ruin it!”

Oh.

The piano store is going out of business at the end of the month because the owner is retiring. Cue hasty calls to refinishing guys. Good wood floor refinishers are busy guys, and finding one who could come before the end of the month was tricky. Finally, the one I liked best called me back: He could see if one of his other clients would switch with us. Then he could come the last week in January. Would that work? Yes please.

Call to piano lady: Is the store shutting down completely on January 31st? It is. But she could call the moving company who had safe piano storage. Maybe they had room.

A day passes.

Other floor client agrees to switch. Yes, to piano storage. Then, yes to floor refinisher. Okay. All set.

But now we need to move all our furniture, and zillions of books, and my eight sets of china and crystal, family paintings, drawers full of linen, and closet full of vases (I know) out of the three rooms we would be refinishing. Pretty much starting NOW.

I need to find a mover. Do I need a storage container in the front yard? Over our crazy walled driveway? Do I need to send my antiques into storage? What about temperatures? What about mice? I can’t sleep.

I find a mover based purely on their slogan: “The potentate of totin’ freight.” They’re local, polite, and kind of funny (as you might have imagined) and have good advice. I don’t need to move the furniture out of the house. They can put our things safely in other rooms.

This seems like a good solution. It may be difficult to walk, but small matter. I am relieved. And still delighted by their slogan. Every. Time.

In the midst of packing up (so far) thirty boxes (while working on a novel), it occurs to me that really, it’s been a long time since we painted these rooms. And we have an estimate from last fall that I’d been sitting on. I text the painter. Could he possibly?? He could. I tentatively approach my husband with this idea. He groans. “Seriously?” I smile my winningest smile.

Meanwhile, the boxes and crates have begun to fill the house to such an extent that there’s nowhere to move, and despite our best efforts, these boxes are HEAVY. I text our neighbor’s lovely twenty-two year old son. He stops by after work, and in less than half an hour and without breaking a sweat, he moves all the boxes into the crawl space in the basement. And with room to spare. He has agreed to return.

Yesterday, I found, to my delight, that the paint store could, in fact, exactly match the paint colors from the heat registers. And…they have a record going back twenty years of every can of paint I’ve purchased. This is great, except for the living room, because there, apparently, I doctored the color, mixing the cans myself. “You seem like the kind of gal who would do that,” commented our painter. Well, yes. But they can match that, too.

So, next week, the painters are coming on Wednesday and Thursday. The movers on Friday. On Monday the floor refinishers come. They will be finished on Friday. On the following Tuesday, the piano comes, and the old piano is taken away. On Wednesday the movers come. On Saturday—and yes, I’m not making this up—the little get-together I’d planned long before we bought the piano is scheduled. And I packed the napkins. In one of thirty boxes.

Meanwhile, the cottage needs its spring cleaning to remove all traces of the mice before we come to escape the dust and fumes. Thank goodness for my cleaning lady, who needs the hours.

Now, where was I in that last chapter?

(The potentate of totin’ freight. Hahahahhahahahha!)

***

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And now for your gratuitous dog photo:

The house is developing an unfamiliar bareness. But Eli is content so long as his people are nearby.