Soon after we settled in, I learned a practical reason a family might part with a piano: because it’s worthless.

Kranich and Bach, it turned out, made finicky instruments that are difficult to maintain, despite their rich sound. And ours needed work. We spent about $400 repairing it, an investment the tuner said would buy us about five years of life on an instrument that, he said, was decent enough for a student.

We soon found a teacher, a young Australian pianist whose enthusiasm inspired my son to practice and play. He was hooked. Our house hummed with the clunky, awkward sounds of learning.

And he kept playing, switching teachers along the way, to a Georgian woman with a heavy Eastern European accent who has brought the hearty Russian composers into our home. Other instruments followed. A violin for our son. A guitar for our daughter. See! I was right. Plunk an instrument in the middle of the room and someone will pick it up.

But as the years ticked on, more keys broke. More repairs were required. Children grow, but rooms do not. And the tight space in the living room felt only tighter. The better my son got, the more he could hear the piano straining under his nimble fingers. What was once the object of his unwavering devotion became a source of frustration, as a pedal would break and keys would stick. We paid for more repairs, only for more keys to fail.

My husband and I began to imagine another life for our living room, one with enough furniture — and a coffee table! — to entertain. Perhaps, I suggested to my son, we could let the piano go and invest in something of a more manageable size. A console or studio piano — what I had always thought of as an upright piano, for example, could sit against the wall, leaving room for other furniture. Eventually, he too saw that maybe it was time to move on. “I want room to run around,” he said finally.

But objects in a home — even unlikely ones you might have inherited — are what give a home life, which is why you can become irrationally attached to items even when it no longer makes sense to keep them. Pianos, in particular, can manage to find allies in friends and family who inexplicably rise to their defense. Tell someone you want to part with a piano and you might as well have told them you were planning to toss a diamond in the trash.