Part of our initiation to Scotland involved the complete destruction of a 100-year-old piano. Kellie got a free one last year and had it delivered to their flat, but turns out that it was no good as the piano tuner gave it a diagnosis of ‘un-tunable’. It felt a little weird to destroy an instrument like that, but at the same really fun to just hack it apart! Brian spent most of the day busting it up in to pieces wherever he could. After work I joined up with him and took some wire clippers to the piano strings. “Sproingggg!, Blaaang!” coughed the strings as they played their last notes ever.

It became even tougher towards the end, as we had to figure out how to get a large piece of metal off of the frame of the piano. It proved to be quite difficult, and I had pretty much given up hope that we would ever get the piano out of a flat that is three flights of stairs up. There were HUGE bolts that we couldn’t get off of the bottom of the metal piece. Brian (who never gives up apparently) busts out a saw and just start sawing one of the bolts off, and it worked! After trading some extreme sawing-sessions, we got the metal plate off. Here’s the bolts and the saw after the fact:

They didn't know that Brian doesn't give in.

So after that, the girls joined us and we carried all of the bits and pieces that were left down the stairs! It was raining quite hard outside, which made the piano smell really bad as it got wet for some reason. Good fun!

Taking the hammers down the stairs

Dirty hands after hard work!