Where to get piano valued ?

joylikes2shop

My mums 100 year old piano takes up too much room & hasn't been played in years. I'm keen for her to get rid of it but would hate to dump it ( it's in fair condition) if it's valuable. If anyone could suggest the name of a company who could value it, I'd be very grateful.

toffifee

My suggestion is to ask a local independent piano seller to have a look at it for you. They might buy old ones from customers who are upgrading so would have a good idea of what it’s worth.
However, hopefully I'm wrong but I wouldn’t get your hopes up. We were given an old piano of similar age to your mother’s and we asked the piano seller to come and tune it for us. When he arrived, his first words were ‘are you sure? It’s completely worthless.’. Apparently, unless they were something really special, pianos from that time have very little value now other than as something nice to look at. Technology has moved on.

Pianos need to be tuned twice per year, otherwise they gradually get flatter and flatter and cannot be tuned back up to the correct pitch. The only solution would be to put new strings in but I dread to think how much that would cost – re-stringing my violin is expensive enough!

When we upgraded to a new piano, we advertised the old one on Freegle and the local rugby boys came and took it for their club. The piano seller's only other suggestion was to give it to the local college in case they wanted to do a 'pay to hit the piano with a sledgehammer' fund raising thing!

BigAl94

These people will give you a fair opinion on value http://www.drummondreid.com/

Mistral001

If you have the name of the piano a search of ebay using google might come up with a similar piano which sold. Even though pianos are a bulky item there seems to be a steady trade of them on ebay - at least the last time I looked.


If the piano has a steel frame it might be worth something. All-wood pianos generally are not worth much as they are difficult to keep tuned.