Red Echo

December 12, 2013

I have two sets of four folding theater seats taking up room at ALTSpace. They were originally part of some lecture hall at UW, and they’ve been bouncing around the Seattle burner community for at least a decade now, ending up with me. I had this idea that I would use them to set up a little lecture / presentation area, but I was the only person interested, so the seats got tucked under work benches and have been sitting there collecting dust ever since, waiting for me to figure out what they might be good for.

Now I have a plan. I’m going to take one of them home and set it up in the kitchen. People always hang out in the kitchen during a party, and if you have people over for dinner it’s great to have somewhere for them to sit and chat while you cook. These seats have little fold-out tables designed for writing notes – they’ll make great little mini tables for people’s drinks and snacks.

There’s only room in the kitchen for one of these rows, but perhaps I’ll bring the other one home and install it downstairs. I’d eventually like to fill the place up with big squishy couches and things, but that’s a big project which will take a lot of time, and this would be an only moderately inconvenient way to get more seating in the meantime.

Problem is, these seats are designed to be bolted to the floor, and they don’t really stand up on their own. They are stable side to side, but not front to back. They’re also pretty low, designed to be mounted in an auditorium with a stepped floor. I’ll need to construct some kind of base. Surely someone must have done this before? I’ll just search for it on the internet and steal their design!

I can’t find a one. Is this really the first time someone has thought of this? It seems impossible. Help me, o internet: have you ever heard of such a thing or seen pictures of how it was done?