Gotta get Crack-a-lackin'

When I started this journal back in...shit, January '04?...anyway. One of my earliest complaints was of the white giantess known as the upright piano that now sits in my garage.

We drove to the homeplace (I love that word. It souds so country-as-hell) to extricate it from my grandmother's living room before she began renting the place out. We drove it back to Durham on the back of a Dodge pick-up truck along with several other artifacts of my rural childhood.

The piano sat out in the wind and the rian for about a week until Scott could bring home a few strapping lads to get the thing off without flattening them in the process - the thing weighs as much as a small car, you know.

Since then, it's been sitting out in the garage covered in cobwebs. My plan was to strip it, stain it, varnish it and get it into the house before the cold or humidity could do any further damage to it. Well, a gallon of paint stripper later it's still out there.

I sort of underestimated how large the task would be. Who knew that three coats of white paint could be so stubborn?

Well, Friday I put my foot down and said to myself, "Self, it's been 18 months since that piano has been put in the garage. Seeing as how you can't afford the $3,000 the refinisher wants to do it, I suggest you get your lard ass out there to get 'er done."

Well, I went to Home Depot and bought a heat gun. In two days I've accomplished more than I had in the past year and a half. I'm still going to have to do some chemical stripping to get the residual specks up, but this process is really speeding along.

Scott made a bet with me that if the piano was ready by the time the polyurethane on the living room floor cured (a week from today) he would gift to me a sum equal to my salary for the rest of the year.

*cracks knuckles*

See ya. Pictures later.

Posted by Tiffany at October 2, 2005 11:49 AM | TrackBack