Pianos and Old Seattle Homes: What Your Craftsman Bungalow Does to Your Instrument

I love old Seattle homes. The Craftsman bungalows in Ballard, the Tudors in Montlake, the foursquares on Beacon Hill — they've got character that newer construction just can't match. But if you own a piano and live in one of these homes, your house is working against your instrument in ways you might not realize.

The biggest issue is air leakage. Older homes were built before modern insulation and air-sealing standards, which means outdoor air moves through them freely. Those beautiful single-pane windows, the gaps around doors, the uninsulated walls — they all let moisture in during our wet winters and let it escape during dry summers. The result is that humidity inside the house tracks much closer to outdoor humidity than it does in a well-sealed modern home.

For a piano, this means bigger swings. The soundboard is seeing more moisture variation over the course of a year, which means more movement, more tuning drift, and more stress on the wooden components.

Radiant heat — the old steam radiators and hot-water baseboards you find in many of these homes — creates its own set of issues. Radiators heat objects near them very unevenly. If your piano is in the same room as a radiator, one side might be significantly warmer and drier than the other. I've seen pianos where the bass section holds tune fine and the treble drifts constantly, and it turns out there's a radiator eight feet away on the treble side.

So what can you do? First, think about placement. In an old home, the interior walls are your friends. An interior wall away from windows, away from radiators, and away from exterior doors is the most stable spot in the house. I know that limits your decorating options, and I know sometimes the piano has to go where it fits. But if you have a choice, an interior wall wins every time.

Second, consider what you can do about the air leakage in the room. Storm windows help a lot. Even heavy curtains on single-pane windows make a difference in winter. If you're doing any renovation work, insulating the walls in the room where the piano lives is one of the best investments you can make — for the piano and for your comfort.

Third, a humidifier in winter is close to essential in a drafty old home. The dry air from your heating system, combined with cold air leaking in and being warmed up (which drops its relative humidity further), can push indoor humidity down into the twenties. That's hard on pianos, hard on wood furniture, and hard on your sinuses.

Old homes and pianos can absolutely coexist well. It just takes a little attention to placement and environment. And honestly, there's something fitting about a beautiful old upright in a hundred-year-old bungalow. They belong together.