So what’s the plan with the chairs? And the carpet? And the ceiling? And the auditorium?
Yes, we’ve been thinking hard about these questions too. the plan we’ve come up with is to:
Level one section of the room to use as a stage
Keep the tiered floor in the rest of the auditorium
Re-use 80% of the chairs that are already there
We’ve decided to do this for a few reasons.
First, the cost of levelling the entire floor is pretty significant and we’d like to look at ways to reduce costs. Second, if we did level the whole floor, we wouldn’t be able to use the existing bench seats since they’re specifically designed to be installed into the sloping floor (we looked at ways to get around this). That means we’d have to go out and buy 400+ chairs (and we’d prefer they were ‘nice’ if possible). Again, more costs.
However, we did some research and it seems that bench seating is very efficient (mainly because people leave less than a full chair width between themselves). So it looks like we can fit more people in bench seating than single seats. Added to this, the existing bench chairs are relatively new (20 years old) and are pretty comfy.
Finally, we worked out that if we level out the smallest ‘quarter’ of the room, we end up with a pretty large stage area, and we still keep about 80% of all the seating in the room. And most of those seats are pointing towards the front centre of the ‘stage’; so pretty much exactly what we’d want.
So, this past Tuesday a crew of people came and unscrewed them, and moved them all to the downstairs area of the dwelling. This means there’s clear access to do the other renovations needed and the chairs won’t get damaged. When the renovations on the auditorium are complete, we’ll come in and move the chairs back in!