Seriously, how do piano movers/people move grand or baby grand pianos to places, anywhere? But especially to either small spaces, up stairs, or for example, an apartment/penthouse in a tall building in NYC? I know it happens. It seems very difficult. Explain plz haha
edit for punctuation because my keyboard is broken oh 2nd edit – yeah genuinely no pun intended with the word “keyboard”
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For the stairs they use a kind of robot with caterpillar-like tracks that rolls it up.
While if you have a balcony or terrace sometimes it’s easier to get it in the house through there so they use a type of movable crane.
I asked a professional piano mover how they bring them upstairs, he said “one step at a time”.
NYT has this cool interactive article which shows in detail how it is done:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/06/arts/music/ny-piano-moving.html
Worked in removals for around 14 years. We moved our fair share of pianos. Both upright and grand. Once up a tight spiral staircase. That was super scary but went without a hitch. It took five of us and a lot of sweat, communication and cursing, but we got it there.
Another one that springs to mind is taking a lorry full of stuff to Switzerland from the UK then nipping over to Germany to bring a load back home. There was a super expensive grand piano to be moved. From a second floor flat. With no lift. And only two of us to do it. The boss hired two extra local guys to come and help move the piano. These guys couldn’t speak a word of English and we couldn’t speak German. The customer had to try and translate for us. That job did not go well. Oh and I forgot to mention the stairs had a half landing with a tight turn to go down the next flight of stairs. Incredibly stressful would be an understatement.
We’ll if you ask the people that moved out of my house when I bought it, the first thing you do is drag it across the room and leave a gigantic gouge through the 100+ year old hardwood floors.
Very carefully. 😁
Piano movers don’t just show up. They’ll do a pre-move visit to study the location and take measurements to figure out how to safely move the piano out of its old location and into its new location. The move might even involve some carpentry and the use of cranes. It’s a carefully coordinated operation.
A popular old cartoon and movie meme is a piano being hoisted to a window and then dropped on the sidewalk, so I assume that is how it is or was sometimes done. Back in the day, pianos were found in way more homes, including apartments, than now.
Not sure how the pros do it, but when I was in college me and my roommates lived next to an old lady who came over and asked to help her move her grand piano. We told her we didn’t know what the hell we were doing, but she assured us she just needed some strong guys to carry it outside. When we finally got it outside, it looked like a bull had ran through her hallway and out the front door. I recall thinking that there has to be people who move these things professionally because it was a nightmare.
I have a fun story about this actually. My dad went to elementary school in a one room schoolhouse in the midwest and they had a piano. When they built a bigger school someone 100 miles away got the piano. They actually lowered it by crane into the basement after it was poured and built the house over it. Eventually, many years later, those people were moving and needed the piano gone. Due to the virtues of old people Facebook my dad learned that they were just giving the piano away if you could get it out and my dad being the maguyver of blue collar Midwesterners wanted that thing bad.
So he enlisted me, my uncle, my uncle’s big burley friend, and the guy who owned the place to get it out of the basement. We had to maneuver it around two corners to get it to the stairs which wasn’t bad, but the stairs were insane. The thing was a centimeter less wide than the staircase. Not even kidding. My dad was ecstatic. The legs didn’t come off but we did have to remove the railing on the staircase. We ended up making this pseudo ramp of plywood with cardboard, but we could only go about 4 feet and then had to replace a a back section with a front section so you could actually stand on the stairs. Two guys on the bottom pushing and praying their bodies didn’t give out and the thing came crashing down and smushed them. Two guys at the top trying to lift this fucking boulder from the bottom to reduce friction. Except it was on stairs so you’re actually trying to lift from a spot lower than your feet are setting while not leaning up against the thing so you don’t push back. And one guy at the top of the stairs pulling with a rope.
It was roughly a million degrees that summer day and nearly everyone broke in half, but we did eventually get the damn thing up and out and onto a trailer. We made a straight ramp and put it on rollers, like the roller boards in PE class, to roll it fairly easily into the house where it sat about ten feet from the door.
A couple years later my parents moved and my dad called me to ask to help move it again. I just hung up
Edit: I forgot to add, the thing sounds horrible and the company that made it actually typoed their own name on it. But nostalgia I guess
My parents’ piano needed specialist removal men: it then didn’t fit through any hallways or doors, but those men took a window pane out and winched it through like it happened every day. Which for them it likely did.
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