When I showed up with the van, I beheld my new baby. The veneer on the side panels was peeled off at the bottom, but the sanded wood looked charmingly rustic to my eye. I played a few chords. One key was dead. One string was snapped. It sounded slightly drunk.

We had three guys with around 150 years in non-piano-moving experience and one 615-pound piano. We got it on the dolly easily enough, then failed to move it halfway up the 10-foot-long ramp until a neighbor showed up and helped.

Getting it off the truck required two neighbors and a friend, but we weren’t about to try getting it up the stairs to the house, so I called the movers again. They stopped by on their way from Boston to western Connecticut with a nine-foot Steinway grand. Twenty minutes and another $250 later, my piano was home — $500 spent on moving and much more sweat and drama and wasted time than if I had hired someone. Brilliant me.

Ms. Tiernan, who has several old Steinway uprights in various states of recuperation, paid a visit. She loved the piano the way an archaeologist might adore a mummy. Or a long-term grant.

She coaxed a few strings into tune and offered an optimistic prognosis. For $600 to $1,000, she would revamp the piano’s action, or the myriad parts that strike the strings. A full restoration of the action would cost roughly $20,000, she said, not counting the exterior refinishing. A Steinway rep told me a customer on Fifth Avenue paid $900 for the piano in 1881 (according to this Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank site, that would be about $22,000 today, just a few thousand less than a new Steinway upright in ebony). On top of that, it’s an 85-key piano, three short of the standard, so it’s not worth paying for a full restoration if I ever hope to earn the money back by selling it.

But Ms. Teirnan said that for $1,000, and with regular maintenance, the piano would play nicely for my nonconcert purposes, perhaps for another 20 years or more.

Sounds fine to me.

What of the refinishing job?

The piano had been “ebonized,” or varnished black, to conform to Victorian tastes, so I was told the veneer was never meant to see the light of day. I could replace the veneer on the side panels with sheets of matching veneer and contact cement, but Ms. Blair and several refinishing specialists said it’s a high-risk operation for a beginner.