Our family, though small, loves the blessing of music that has filled our home daily. There are three of us at this current time, I am a stay at home dad with lots of time on my hands and a mind for learning I have picked up a few projects in and around our home including programing permanent Christmas lights on our home to tuning and restoring our 100+ years old piano. Ms Ludwig is the drama teacher at the local middle school with a passion for music and is our resident piano player. The youngest of the family just started with school and enjoys sitting with mom learning to play the piano as well as a few other instruments. Â Â This piano originally was bought by my grandma's family down in Holden, Utah, around the year 1917. Unfortunately at some point in its early life and because of some of the needs of the family all the original player reels were lost or destroyed. Later in life my grandma moved up to Klamath Falls, Organ, taking the piano with her and it stayed with her family for many years being used regularly. It was during this time that during one of the matinance visits my grandma was told about some dry rot happening within so of the rubber tubing for the player mechanics and almost all the tubing was removed and not replaced. In early 90's the piano again traveled a few hundred miles back to Utah being passed down to my father. At this time many of my siblings and myself were signed up for lessons though due to costs and other situations those lessens did not go for long, just long enough for 5 year old me to learn to play the basic, Mary Had a Little Lamb and other 3 note tunes. Between the time that the tube's for the player was removed till 2017 the piano was sadly neglected the varnish stared to fade and chip, key tops went missing, and the piano slowly became more and more out of tune. In 2017 I inherited the piano from my parents with the invitation to, "Do what you want with it." My wife and I moved it into our Orem home where it sits today. Over the last 5 years I have felt more comfortable to start to take it apart, where it started was the keys my daughter i saw she was becoming more and more interested on playing it but with her being young the original ivory key tops, having become chipped and sharp on many of the edges were cutting her wrists, to fix this I started to replace them with an ivory look alike keeping the original ivory on the key front and rear portion of the key tops. When I got the key tops I also got a tuning hammer and kit to work on getting the piano back into tune, after watching copious YouTube videos I felt ready to tackle the tuning, we both survived though it took me a week or so to tune and retune every note things were sounding much better. Ultimately I would love to restore this piano myself, stripping and refinishing the wood and bringing it back to the look and feel of it being new. I know that with the player mechanics things are a little too far gone to restore it and because of that I would love to give it a restoration with adding modern technology with a new digital payer system. Again things I could see myself doing but I also know it is well beyond my skill set to do this.
