Can't give them away: Vintage upright pianos are meeting a sorry end

Scroll through an online for-sale site like Kijiji or Facebook Marketplace and you will almost always spot old upright pianos on offer, either for free or for a very, very low price. 

The wooden pianos can be beautiful, but the ads tend to stay up a while because the instruments are very heavy to move and often out of tune. 

"At one point in time, I thought at least every other home had a piano, because I could drive down the street and say, 'I've been there, I've been there, I've been there,'" says Mike Klomp, who has been tuning and repairing pianos on Prince Edward Island for more than 35 years.

Klomp used to take free upright pianos, fix them up and sell them. Now he won't take them, because there is no market for them.

"I couldn't even resell it, because the amount that I would have to put into it would exceed the amount I would ever get for it. It's unfortunate," he said. 

Janine Gosbee of Cornwall, P.E.I., was given an old upright a few years ago, when her daughter started learning piano. But now her daughter is in a school band program, and has dropped piano lessons. 

Gosbee has had the piano listed as free for several weeks — but the ad has garnered only three lukewarm inquiries.

"Most of them were actually just asking about the measurements of the piano for a place to put it in their home. So that's kind of an issue too — just people having the space in their home for it," Gosbee said. 

She is surprised there's so little interest in a free piano, speculating that fewer people might be learning to play, or those who do play are opting for electronic keyboards that are light and portable. 

There was a big explosion in manufacturing and selling upright pianos in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, Klomp said. Many people were taught to play as part of a well-rounded education, and the pianos were a social hub in many homes in the days before radio and TV sets took hold. 

But now, more and more of those pianos have reached the end of their usefulness, and people are having a hard time finding places for them.

Klomp said people usually put the old uprights in two places: online, or in a landfill. 

"They will advertise them as free pianos, so they won't have to spend money on moving them, or they will send them to the dump," he said. "Some will donate them to churches, schools, different places, but the problem is those places, I've seen churches with five pianos, and they only use one."

Klomp said when he started years ago, he spent 60 per cent of his time tuning old upright pianos. Now, he spends about 60 per cent of his time tuning newer Yamaha uprights.