The piano: Heritage

At the antique store with the piano was a framed page that gave some of the piano's history. The piano was made in 1853, but our story begins in 1900.

Krouroe Gordon Jones of Mississippi had asked the beautiful Celeste Bedell Collins for her hand in marriage. Krouroe wanted to give his future bride a wonderful gift; he traveled to New York and bought a piano, just exactly like the Presidential Piano.

The president in question is William McKinley, whose piano was bought by McKinley's father after the 1853 New York Exposition and given to McKinley's mother, who later allowed President McKinley to take it to the White House. Looking at our piano and the McKinley piano, they're not "just exactly" alike, but close. Our is actually a bit fancier.

Krouroe carried the piano home to his betrothed in a wagon from New York City to Franklin, Louisiana, St. Mary Parish, on Bayou Teche. Lessie (as Celeste was called) was thrilled with her beautifully crafted instrument.

Krouroe had an arduous journey by wagon with the heavy piano. The Galveston Hurricane of September 8, 1900, hit and he took shelter. When he made it home, all was well.

The family and the piano lived on the Alice C Plantation, a sugar plantation, from 1900 until 1920, when they moved to Houston. The couple had a daughter, Celeste Bedell Jones, in 1907. The piano stayed in the family until 1990, when it was sold by her daughter to an unrelated family.

Here's where the story gets interesting to us. We did a search for Celeste Bedell Jones, and found the 1928/29 General Announcements from the Rice Institute, which included degrees conferred on June 6, 1927, and showed her graduating "with distinction". Further searching of genealogy sites found her daughter (the one who sold the piano), and her distinctive name led us to find her father, Whitman Denny Mounce, listed as a sophomore back in the same Rice general announcements!

What are the odds that a piano that a couple of Rice graduates (us) buy was previously owned by a pair of Rice graduates?

The piano: an introduction

The interior

A few weeks ago, while out at our favorite bird store, we decided to browse a nearby antique store. One of the first things we looked at was an old square grand piano. We didn't give it a lot of consideration at the time, but on the way home, we had the "did you see anything you liked" discussion, and Roy mentioned the piano.

After further discussion and a fair bit of web research, we decided that it would be a nice 20th anniversary present to ourselves to buy the piano and have it restored, and make it a special feature of our remodeled house.

(If only we can get the remodel to happen.)

Our web research turned up the Antique Piano Shop web site, which is clearly the most useful and popular web site on the subject. The owner, Michael Stinnett, has been restoring pianos since he was a teenager, and we think is almost single-handedly responsible for there being any market for restoring them at all. From some modern musicians' perspectives, they are not desirable. However, our interest isn't primarily in having a professional instrument worthy of a grand concert hall--we're more excited about preserving a bit of Americana. There's also the issue of authenticity: the modern piano sounds considerably different from what composers of the 1800s played on and wrote for.

Ivory keys: all present, only one seems to be replaced

We went back to the store and spent a little time playing the piano to see how functional it was. It turned out to be surprisingly functional. Some of the low notes had problems with damping, and the high end was out of tune, but in the middle, it worked well (notwithstanding that all the felts desperately need replaced). We figure that is promising for restoration potential.

Front view - note the Empire Revival octagonal legs (Click on the pic for full view.)

We wrote to Michael Stinnett to see if he could tell us how old the piano was, and how much it might make sense to pay for it. By looking up the serial number, he was able to tell us

AGE: According to the serial number you provided, your piano was built in 1853. We estimate that less than 10% of the surviving square pianos today are from the pre-Civil War era. These pianos are exceedingly rare.

1853 is the year that Stephen Foster wrote "Old Kentucky Home". More:

Maker's mark

Let me start by saying that A. H. Gale built exceptional pianos. Although they are very rare, we have restored a handful of A. H. Gale square grand pianos over the years. They are consistently some of the most well made square pianos we see come through our shop. We have seen some vintage catalogs showing square pianos selling for as much as several hundred dollars at the turn of the century...the cost of a small house of the era! In the past decade alone we have seen these pianos nearly DOUBLE in value, making their restoration a very good investment. You most likely have a wonderful piano there with a lot of potential.

Also:

The models with the Mother Of Pearl as you described were used only on the most expensive, high-grade pianos offered at the time.

Well, that's encouraging, even keeping in mind that his interest is in convincing us to restore it. It doesn't matter to us whether we could potentially sell it for more than we put into it. We intend to keep it. We really wanted to know was that we weren't getting, say, the least-worth-preserving piano out there. At any given time, there are plenty of unrestored square grands available on eBay.

Note the curved keyboard end

So we put it on layaway. Not because we are strapped for cash, but because that gets them to store it for us for a while. We want to ship it direct from the store to the restoration shop, and from there to our remodeled house. To do that, we need to get the remodel done!

The piano has an interesting history. More on that next time.

Progress on one front

We successfully closed on our HELOC (Home Equity Line of Credit) this evening. It only took 3 loan officers (phone) and 3 bankers (local) to get it done in 49 days. We were told, of course, that we'd have one banker (who ended up leaving for another bank!) and one loan officer (who decided to take vacation in the summer, who ever heard of such a thing?!?! and then so did her backup...), but it's all finished. Finally.

The bank undervalued our home even more than the county, but since this LOC was a contingency plan anyways (we'll dip into it after we run out of savings), that's ok. And the rate was good - prime plus 1.24% (the rate will vary with the prime, but we don't see the prime going anyplace any time soon).

Now, if only we could find time to work on the design and/or find someone we trust to do it for us...we'd be set.

Reflections

It's been 4 weeks since the train wreck occurred. We have indefinitely halted the actual remodeling process. We're thinking maybe the end of this year, once we shouldn't be on the dirty side of any more hurricanes, tropical depressions, etc. I think that maybe experiencing two different named tropical systems in 12 days was a sign from God that this wasn't supposed to happen this way. It certainly caught my attention, anyways, and I can be superstitious when the occasion warrants.

We had a few exchanges with the Design-Build firm July 6-8. In one, the owner lamented for the 2nd time the fact that they didn't have specs on the pool and its enclosure, and they should have asked more questions (because the 20 page "we want these things in these rooms" apparently wasn't sufficient info to go on).

Fed up with them blaming us for the pool debacle, we referred them to an e-mail we sent them May 21 (the day after we first met with them). In that e-mail was the pool spec, which hasn't changed significantly. That finally shut Bill up about how the pool room error was due to our not communicating spec. (Yes, him harping on that just made me mad. You FUBAR'ed it, shut up and take responsibility already. At least he shut up about it, even if he hasn't acknowledged they screwed up.)

We're sporadically working on designing our house. The software is pretty fun to play with. We get frustrated by it on occasion, probably limited in part by our inexperience with it and in part with limitations in the version we bought. (We might upgrade to the next product up, but that costs more than twice this product. So, Roy's not sure it's worth it. Of course, being able to create architectural objects would be most handy, so the time savings could be worth the cost.)

With my work getting crazier by the day, we also needed to slow this process down or risk sending me to the loony bin. Since we have almost all of our products selected already, it's just a matter of getting the right design for the core of the house and the addition. We love the west side modifications we've made, we just have to make the actual core - kitchen/breakfast, entry, living room, and dining room - work. We have some ideas there, too, and some serious issues to address. But we have time - we have waited this long to remodel, waiting til we have a design we love is not a problem for us.

Roy built our pool in the software and even filled it with water. He had some serious frustrations with the process, but is happy with the result. He's also made significant progress on our new master bathroom, dressing area, and closet layout for our bedroom. There are issues to work out there, too, but they look easier than the core of the house.

I do not know what the future holds, but appreciate the thoughts and prayers that have come my way during this process. I'm sure that they are what has held me together at times. I only cried that first night. Since then, I've bounced between aggravation, disbelief, and even laughing at the idiocies they tried to push off on us in the name of "better design".

Yes, I can laugh about it now. There are things, such as removing our large windows that are set in brick and knocking out brick a few feet down to put smaller windows, that just make me mad and show that Will really doesn't understand what design in a remodel is all about. There is no way on earth that you could make that change look good. With what are you going to fill in those holes (24 sf and 18 sf) in the brick wall to make the patch blend with the existing brick façade? I can answer that for you: nothing. There isn't a thing in this world that you could do that would make that look good. More problems were created than solved with that "design move". And that, my friends, is a bad, bad, bad thing.

Now, for your entertainment, here are some excerpts from their communications:

Voice mail from Bill, the owner, (and father of Will, the designer) in response to our e-mail asking them to stop working on our design:

We are very, very sorry that you guys are disappointed - that's crushing for us. We strive to try to do the best that we can, but evidently we have failed to provide you with the service that you wanted...

Yes, it must just be "crushing" for them. Crushing to know that they might have kissed the really big project $$ good-bye. But, hey, they have the Design Fee to keep them warm at night.

A followup e-mail before we had a chance to respond to his voice message:

it seems like we deviated from some of your major criteria and failed to include others that you felt were important....We should have gotten a little more information on the endless pool size and surrounding space requirements.... I also apologize for not understanding your commitment to the master shower set up. We should have just designed the one you wanted and not tried to show you other possibilities....Will has learned a hard lesson on when to be creative and when to give clients what they want even if he has a better design idea.

Yeah, ignoring 90% of a 20 page scope of work document, which listed items to be addressed room by room, along with an initial listing of likes, dislikes, and "Big Picture" items...that might be "deviated from".

E-mail from Bill, in response to a follow-up e-mail from us:

3. It may make sense to have a meeting with Will & I before you get too involved with re-designing so we have an opportunity to discuss with you some of the challenges and difficulties. This way you will not waste your time putting something together that may not work for reasons beyond your construction knowledge. From that meeting we can be both providing solutions and come up with creative answers together.
5. We are in no rush either and have no time table to complete the design. Only to have a completed design we can build within your budget constraints. With respect to the budget, we need to keep a careful watch over the design. We do not want to end up with a great design and then we cannot afford to build it.

Italics are mine. Lessee...our construction knowledge tells us that placing a dishwasher in an island in a kitchen on a slab foundation is...something "that may not work" - yet it was in the design given to us-we are the ones who pointed it out. Likewise with "erasing" existing large windows set in our brick home - somehow, "our construction knowledge" tells us that there is no way to make that work - yet several of those were in the design given to us. And, the crowning glory is the 6 ft wide by 25 ft long overhang that Will created between the pool and the existing back entrance to the den - yeah, that puppy isn't structurally feasible without one heck of a lot of supporting pillars, etc. And I won't go into the fact that he pulled the center line of the roof off center of the bedroom....just completely whacked.

And with respect to budget? Yeah, those aforementioned new windows that Will put in the design would certainly chew up a large portion of that budget, look crappy, and ... you get the point. 'nuff gritchin'.