All that remained for me to do was to pick out a brand-new piano from the store. I made an appointment and was shown a couple of pianos of the make and model I was interested in. When I played them, one in particular stood out to me as having a superior touch and tone. It was weird, because throughout my piano shopping, I'd kind of noticed that brand-spanking-new pianos generally don't sound as good as pianos that are a couple of years old. The felt on the hammers get packed down and things settle with time, and I like the effects of that aging. This one piano, more than the others I played that day, actually sounded like a piano that wasn't brand-new, but I was told it was new, so I didn't think much of it--I just thought it was a unique beast.

As a good piano shopper should, when I told them this was the piano I wanted, I wrote down the serial number, just to make sure the same piano was delivered to my house.

A couple of days later, I was on the Internet and decided just to make sure about the piano's age. At Kawai's website, you can look up a list of the serial numbers that were placed on pianos every year back to the '70s. I looked up the number of the piano I'd picked out, and lo and behold, it was manufactured in 2003.

This was particularly troublesome to me, because I knew that Kawai had redesigned their action and made it more durable and sensitive in 2004. One of the reasons I had agreed to pay a little more for this brand new piano than I could have paid for the 2000 piano from the private owner was because it would have this new and improved action. And now it was apparent that this "new" piano had just been sitting on the showroom floor for four years, and didn't have the feature I had agreed to pay for.

I thought it would be a difficult thing to call up and register this complaint, but actually it was quite easy. I just explained that I had looked up the serial number and found that it was an older piano, and I had specifically agreed to a BRAND-NEW piano. The manager (my saleswoman was out that day) simply said OK we'll get you a new one.

As it turned out, a week or two later I went to a different store in the same chain where they had just unpacked a piano that had just arrived from Japan. I took a look at it and it played remarkably well for a brand new one. But I knew it was new this time because not only did I take a copy of the list of serial numbers and years with me (by my calculations the piano was built in December 2006 or January 2007), but it actually smelled like paint.

And so the piano saga ends, with a 5'10" black beauty in my living room, and me enjoying that "new piano smell."

Now if I only had time to practice...