Hi guys!  So Colleen and I both decided that it would be agreeable for us to bring back Wedding Wednesday on a more regular basis so that I could check in every now and again to discuss wedding related issues and thoughts.  While I must admit that wedding planning has taken a back seat to calligraphy jobs in the last week or so, I am happy to report that we have a few important details taken care of including choosing our venue.  Pretty much as soon as we got engaged, I knew that choosing a venue was going to be something we had to do almost immediately because all of the good dates for next spring were going fast.  I feel certain that Chris thought I was being a nutso by scheduling a bunch of venue visits so quickly, but I think when he started hearing the venue people talk about Spring 2016 dates already being booked, he realized that maybe I wasn’t such a crazy person Bridezilla and that maybe just maybe I was right.  Since Colleen had gotten married a few years ago, I was pretty aware of what venues were around and also got some input from some friends who are in the wedding industry.  We were really pleasantly surprised with all of our options.  The first thing we did was look at our possible budget and crunch numbers.  Each venue has so many different policies that it was easy to see how overlooking little details will end up costing you much more than you had originally thought.  For example, were tables and chairs included in the rental cost?  How many? Were plates and glassware included?  Did we have to use a specific caterer?  If we did, did we have to pay the venue a service fee for service provided by the caterer (usually 15-20%)?  Is there a cleaning fee?  Do you need day of insurance?  I won’t go into all of this junk, but let me just say that it was a little overwhelming and with all of these little details that you have to be aware of before making a decision, it is easy to see how people may miss something and end up blowing their budget.  Once we came to terms with how much having a wedding was going to cost…GULP, we picked our favorites.  There were some pretty great places and we had two in particular that we loved the most.  However, the two places that we were deciding between and had very different feels and would have been very different weddings.  This made things a little confusing.  We also obviously had to take into account which would be better for our guests.  We really could have been very happy with either.  In the end, we picked the one that we felt was more “us” and would work best for the way we wanted our wedding to feel.  Well, fancy version of us.  Real version of us is scrubs and yoga pants and going to bed by 10:00pm on Friday nights (probably after eating Mexican food and watching Breaking Bad on Netflix).  So we have a wedding set for May of next year (yay!) and quite a few things to do before then.

Image credits  1  2  3  4

Spoiler alert… None of these places are our wedding venue.  Just pretty pictures I stole from the internets.