the beautiful new addition to our home

I've been meaning to post for a while now about our new PIANO! My parents were generous enough to let us sell an old piano they had and use the money to help buy a new one here in Texas. Looking for a piano was quite the experience. We knew we didn't have room (or the money) for a grand, but we needed a piano nice enough for me to teach on. So we settled on finding a Yamaha U1 or U3, both fantastic upright models. At first we spent some time looking around on Craigslist, but not many pop up and they go really fast. (Random: we almost bought one from the lead bassist from the band Fastball. Remember them?) We eventually decided to go with a refurbished one from a store. We missed the selection you'd find in Utah--there are so many piano stores there! There are maybe two stores that sell Yamahas here? After visiting this horrible music store here that seriously tried to sell us a Clavinova (okay...nothing wrong with them for certain purposes, but I couldn't believe they were trying to convince a teacher with a piano degree that a Clavinova would be a much better choice), we ended up at this great store called Strait Music where we found a gorgeous refurbished U1 with an absolutely gorgeous sound, tone quality, etc. We fell in love and got it a few days later. It felt like Christmas Eve the night before it was being delivered...we were both soooo excited we could barely sleep. Though neither one of us have been able to play it as much as we would like, we are so happy to have music in our home. We're hoping Andy gets a little better at a schedule by January so I can start teaching.



We framed some of my most favorite pieces I've played above the piano: