Rick Schaeffer sat down in front of the 1917 Steinway piano he spent 500 hours restoring and ran his hand over the thick, laser-cut Victorian music rack he commissioned for it.
“There’s no reason on Earth to restore Steinways — you ask any restorer and they’ll tell you that,” he said. “You can’t make a living out of it.”
But Schaeffer does it, anyway, as did his father, Albert, and grandfather John Pierre, a German cabinet-maker who started Schaeffer Piano Co. in 1901 at 8th and H streets Northeast.
He is so clearly fond of the exquisitely restored vintage pianos in his Rockville shop that you don’t believe him when he says, laughing: “Not a day goes by I don’t wish these were all sinks and toilets. Nobody wants a piano, but everyone needs a plumber.”
Schaeffer Piano Co. is an institution — a tiny, modest-looking strip-mall store that keeps the city’s aristocrats, embassies and piano-lovers in Steinways.
Schaeffer buys the rare pianos from auctions or estate sales in mostly terrible condition and uses his expertise, and that of his brother and other longtime staff, to restore them.
He can tell by hitting a key whether a piano is German-, American- or Japanese-made.
Schaeffer paid $9,000 for the 1923 Steinway currently in the showroom and put $24,000 worth of parts and time into it. He’s selling it for $36,000 — a profit of only $3,000.
Schaeffer restores about 10 Steinways a year to sell from his store and restores about 20 more for the piano’s owners.
To fill out the business, he sells new pianos, too, but trying to sell pianos is a bit like trying to sell buggy whips, he likes to say, implying that the instruments are irrelevant.
Schaeffer recently bought 30 fixer-uppers from a Montgomery County Schools auction just for the parts — not even schools want pianos any more, he says matter-of-factly.
Still, Schaeffer takes pride in the company’s long history and superior reputation.
At the end of the school year, his father used to ask the Montgomery Blair High School shop teacher who the best “shop boy” was and offered to hire him on the spot.
Ernie, Montgomery Blair’s best shop boy in 1967, just retired from Schaeffer’s this year.
“You can’t open the yellow pages without seeing a half a dozen tuners and a half a dozen technicians that were trained by me,” Schaeffer says proudly. “Every store that does refinishing — the head refinisher came from here.”
