Having had a piano (an older Yamaha upright not even a grand) damaged in a move in the past - I will NEVER EVER allow general movers, no matter how highly rated they are, to handle any expensive musical instruments of mine.
A couple of my friends have used Modern Piano Moving in the past to move a concert grand reliably and they seem to be pretty highly rated.
Yeah, free pianos are usually being sold at the appropriate market price. Often they are badly beat up: the action may not have been maintained, the strings may have been detuning for 5+ years, some notes may not even be tunable any more. On top of that, the moving and setup costs are huge.
If you take the ratio of amount of time I play my piano to the TCO of my piano, I am expecting to spend something like $2-5 TCO / hour of entertainment (without considering resale value in ~30 years) over my life. That is a ratio that is better than most forms of entertainment. It rivals computer games, which are also pretty good on TCO / hour of enjoyment.
That is even the case with a very high-end instrument. Perhaps more people should have things like pianos.
Eh. I mean, I don't have a piano, but I think a world in which no one ever does anything that can't be done on a laptop computer, would not be a better place.
