Venue Preview

This week my wonderful husband, the maid of honor and the best man are going to be going with me to to preview our venue. We are going to go take  a tour of the building and get TONS of photos. (I will share some of the photos we get after we go check everything out.) This will help us keep that detailed image of what it will all look like out there inside and out so we can use them to help with the decorating.

My husband and I are very fortunate with our Maid of Honor and Best Man choices because they are our best friends and are like family to us. They each have some very unique things to bring to the table that will help with taking our tour of the venue. For starters the best man has a talent at figuring out what will fit and work in rooms just by getting to look at them and walk around them in person. The maid of honor has a talent for creating stylish well everything from wardrobe to decor so she will be wonderful at helping me in vision my vision in the spaces we are allowed to use. They also have already done the whole "real ceremony reception thing" and will probably be able to help with negotiating the contract and making sure we have all our bases covered. Besides all of this they are two extra special people in our life and we are thrilled that they are going to be able to go check it out in person with us this week.

With all of this going on I can't help but be excited even though the handfasting is still a year away I am loving each moment of the planning.

Location, Location, Location....

Everyone says that besides the date the location of the ceremony and reception are the most important parts of the planning when doing a handfasting/vow renewal/wedding and so since we already have a date selected that was our next project.  Since we both enjoy being out in nature I had an idea to pick a local state park. I checked out their site and discovered that they had a building that would hold 100 people which helped us decide how many people could be invited giving us a much more intimate event. However when I called to check the availability of our date I was informed that the building I had found which was SUPER affordable (the building for all day use, plus tables and chairs for up to a hundred people with tax is $220) is a building that they only use seasonally....and our date was out of season.


PANIC PANIC PANIC ( I loved that deal and I knew nobody would be able to beat it)

So I started calling around to check other places just to confirm that we had the best deal going...and it turns out we did. Everywhere that I called wanted $1,000 or more for just the space not counting everything else that we would need to make it to where we could have the ceremony and reception. That KILLED our budget that we had which is really conservative considering what we are doing.

What is a girl to do.....well change the date of her vow renewal of course...You see for us the date is not the most important part we just wanted to have a chance to celebrate our marriage, with family and friends, and create some special pre-children memories because they will be on their way shortly after I graduate school in 2015. So we decided that we would plan the handfasting for April  2015 instead of January 2015. When we were married we decided to be impulsive after dealing with the stresses of planning a ceremony and reception and all the family drama that goes into it and chose to elope right then but had been planning a wedding for April which was when we first started dating. So thanks to the seasonal availability of our preferred venue we changed the date and are now going to have an opportunity to see what our handfasting would have looked like if we had done it as planned. We selected the anniversary of us being together as our date for the handfasting/vow renewal date and are both really excited about it.

Location is SO important and as you can see played a BIG part in when our special day is going to happen. I am so thankful that we were still able to get the location that we wanted, saving all that money, and pick a date that has very significant meaning to us as well. That day we will have been a couple for 11 years, and will be celebrating our 10 years of marriage surrounded by family and friends. What more could a happy couple ask for?