*The Thrifty Home: Navy Blue Painted Piano

Thursday, August 29, 2013

I have always wanted to paint a piano, so when I found an old worn one at the thrift store for $200, I bought it. It had been in a school since the early 1980s and was very worn. I could tell it had been pushed through many tight doors by the bent knobs and scratched sides. I decided to paint it a glossy navy blue.

Soon after I bought the piano, I found the bench at a different thrift store. I knew that once painted it would look like it always belonged with the piano.

Later I found this magazine rack for $3 at the thrift store and I spray painted it a glossy lime green. It works perfectly as a music rack.

I had a lot of fun creating this gallery wall above the piano using photos from our recent trip to Northern California.

Here is how I did it:

I started off by unscrewing the pieces of the piano. It was easy to see how the keys came out after taking the cover off and they were all numbered which made keeping them in order easy. After I pulled out the keys, I laid them out on the table and cleaned them up.

This piano had been in a school for many years and had a lot of garbage under the keys. After removing the garbage we carefully used an air compressor to blow out the dust in all the areas of the piano.

We taped up everything we didn't want painted and filled in all of the big gashes and scratches.

I tried 3 different colors out before deciding on the navy blue. Later I used the light blue to spray a frame for the gallery wall and the green to spray the magazine rack featured.

We sprayed it inside since there is no way just the 2 of us could carry that thing outside. We made sure to seal off the room we used, cover everything, and open windows. The spray paint still made lots of dust for me to clean in other rooms, but could have been worse. All of the parts that could be removed from the piano were taken outside and sprayed.

We used 2 cans of Rustoleum spray primer and sprayed one coat. It dried quickly and we were able to spray the first coat of paint after an hour.

We made the huge mistake of using Valspar spay paint from Lowes for the first coat. We followed the instructions and shook the can for 15 minutes, but the paint was very inconsistent coming out light blue in some places and then dark blue in others. I went online and found that many people have complained about this issue with the Valspar spray paint line. Lowes refunded our money and we bought Rustoleum Navy Blue gloss spray paint. We used 6 cans of spray paint and applied 2 coats.

I also sprayed the bench and covered the top with new fabric.

I got the cute knobs at Hobby Lobby.

Total cost for the piano:
$200 piano
$40 primer and spray paint
$5 new knobs

I used these Command picture hanging strips to hang all of the pictures on my wall. I didn't have to put any holes in the wall and they made the job 10X faster and easier. I will never use a nail or screw to hang a picture again (This is my own opinion and I was not paid to endorse Command Strips).

The gallery wall is made up of frames I already had, a few frames from the dollar store and thrift store, and a plate holder featuring photo books.