LEWISTON – Standing in the street outside her childhood home, Louise Forgues watched as the centerpiece of so many family moments hung from a crane.

“I have mixed feelings,” she said Friday. “It’s like giving up a family member.”

About 20 feet above Howe Street, workers delicately adjusted Forgues’ heirloom, a Merrill piano that had sat in her second-story living room all her life.

Forgues, 67, had sold the house. The piano had to go, too.

There’s no room at her new home, a camp on Taylor Pond in Auburn. However, the piano will continue to make music. Forgues donated it to her church.

The 90-year-old instrument will be polished, tuned and turned out when Saints Peter and Paul Church completes the renovation of its first floor next year. The piano will find its home in the reconfigured lower chapel.

The thought comforted Forgues as she watched the movers Friday.

Arriving at the home around 7 a.m., workers from Lewiston-based Gordon’s Moving Inc. removed a window from the second-story living room. Then, using a ramp to manage the distance from the floor to the window sill, three men pushed the piano out onto a platform that hung from a crane.

By 7:15, the instrument appeared outside, wrapped in a packing blanket beneath a layer of cellophane.

“That thing is heavy,” said Forgues, who took photos as the workers delicately balanced the piano on the hanging platform

In 10 more minutes, the instrument was sitting in the back of the company’s yellow moving van.

“We do this kind of thing all the time,” said mover Gordon Beckwith, who estimated the piano’s weight at 600 to 700 pounds.

In Boston, New York and Philadelphia, such moves are commonplace, said Beckwith. But it’s unusual for a place like Lewiston.

“If you have the equipment,” he said, eyeing the crane, “it’s not a problem.” Besides, this piano warranted the treatment.

“It’s in mint condition,” he said.

Forgues still has the piano’s original sales receipt from March 1915. It was purchased at 319 Lisbon St. at a shop called A. Laurence and Company.

One of her relatives bought the piano, and it seems her whole family learned to play on it. Gatherings were focused around the instrument, joined by a trombone or violin.

When her brother visited three weeks ago, he took the time to play a song.

The piano still has plenty of music left in it, said Scott Vaillancourt, the church’s music director. By 9 a.m. Friday, the piano sat in a basement room of the grand church. It will stay there until the renovation is complete.

Vaillancourt, who leads the choir and plays the organ, took a moment to play a few chords on the piano in the storage room.

“It has a big sound,” he said.