Building...

We are adding on to our home right now.  Living in half a house is proving to be pretty fun but takes some flexibility.  The kids like to play piano a lot.  We are the rare parents that have to kick kids off of the piano and into bed, eating, school, general self-care and good hygiene.  The piano obviously has to stay with us in an easy to access place during the entire course of construction.  We now have a piano in our kitchen.  Did I tell you we are now living in the kitchen and bedrooms and that is it?  Too true.  We eat at the kitchen counter, we read in bed.   Lucky the jackhammering is over for now.  At some points in the last two weeks, there was jackhammering right beneath the floor of our house as they removed the massive fireplace foundation.

Back to the piano.  Last night we had a meeting with a solar power contractor (yes, we are considering this again . . . more about that later).  We are not going to invite contractors for meetings into our bedroom, so we all crammed into the kitchen with the kids eating dinner (all of us still in taekwondo gear) and getting going for bed.  J wanted to play piano for a while during the meeting.  Luckily, we have a piano that has a silent mode.  He remembered this and I watched him proudly as he donned the headphones and got set up to go.  Well silent is not exactly silent and he was playing something pretty fiercely.  You still hear the hammers hitting the strings but the soundboard is pulled back, or something like that.

After listening to it and trying to concentrate on what the solar sales guy was presenting, it dawned on me what the piano was sounding like:  muffled jackhammering.