Locations

Anything from your own backyard, a mountaintop vista or a boat in the middle of the ocean

Achievement Unlocked: Location

April 26, 2012
Achievement Unlocked: Location

A location can make or break your wedding. It’s true. A great location means all you have to do is show up and it’s gorgeous. Things like manicured gardens and stately old homes fall into this category, and can sometimes be hard to find or outside of your budget. Instead, most of us are looking for a Good location. One that has enough natural beauty–good bones, you could say–that a few small touches will be enough to make it right for you and yours, but not a completely blank slate. Todd and I have found our Good location, and no surprise it’s Honey Lake Plantation. Even though I chuckled a bit because I have a bad habit of falling in love with the first house/car/idea I come across, we really did look at other options, officially and unofficially, but none of them measured up. There are still details to work out, logistics to factor-in, and all the usual event planning schtuff, but by choosing HLP we’ve made things a lot easier on ourselves while securing our wedding in a very pretty place. This decision came at a price, however. 70% of our budget, to be precise. But that includes location, [...]

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Under Pressure

April 19, 2012
Under Pressure

After a month more-or-less away from wedding planning, I’ve jumped back in to try an pick up where I left off with the location hunt. I have one word for that: Ugh! It’s like getting out of the habit of diet or exercise, you start back up expecting to be where you were but, no, you’ve slipped. So back I’ve trawled through my Wedding Mail folder, digging up the old quotes and trying to figure out what else I need in order to make a decision. One thing that was painfully apparent: I need caterer quotes, too. As some of the places we’re looking at are all-in-one, the ones that are location-only aren’t easy to compare apples to apples. It’s not even like apples to oranges, it’s more like apples to kumquats. Harnessing the power of the Internet I send out a handful of hopeful ballpark estimate requests. I was upfront about our budget limitations, explained the vision I had for our reception based on our favorite dining experience to date, and explained how I saw that transitioning to our wedding reception. The first reply I got said our budget was a bit low for that sort of meal (a bit? [...]

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On Locations: Opera, Gardens, and a Park, Too!

February 28, 2012
A better view of the Gazebo, foliage and lighting in the back of the Monticello Opera House

Heading home from our trip to Honey Lake Plantation, we decided to add a second, unofficial, site-visit to the day and pulled into an empty parking lot just across from the back of Monticello Opera House, one of the other venues I’d scoped out online. It’s hard to miss, if you’re looking for it, as it’s smack in the middle of town, catty-corner to the courthouse.  Imposing red brick, great wood and a convenient gazebo in the back would make for quite a doable location for us in that same, tucked-out-of-the-way feeling. Since we didn’t have an appointment–it really was just a spur of the moment thing–we contented ourselves with the public-access areas: the backyard and what we could see from the sidewalks. Having checked out their rates online, I knew that the rental fee for the ballroom was nominal compared to some, and on-par to the location fees of HLP, and came with adequate tables and chairs, as well. We could bring in our own catering, alcohol and pretty much everything else. They’d recently had an event (or were just about to have one), so looking in the big windows out onto the street and sidewalk we could see [...]

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On Locations: Honey Lake Plantation

February 23, 2012
Honey Lake Plantation

Let the games begin! Or something like that. Wedding planning is sort of like reindeer games, in that there are a lot of hoops to jump through, options to try out, and it’s like you’re at the beginning of the obstacle course with the venue as your first challenge. Challenge accepted! The first venue that really piqued our curiosity was Honey Lake Plantation in Greenville, Florida. taken from the tour bus from the vantage point of the chapel (all photos personal) What made it stand out on paper? First, the event coordinator, Cara, was so helpful via email. It didn’t look like our budget would make it possible, then she came back with the idea of using one of the smaller reception venues (since we’re only 50 people, this makes sense!), then we talked about ways to keep the catering budget in line. She even checked out my blog. HLP also got major points for being cool with us bringing in our own wines and our own dessert option (be it the ubiquitous cupcake tower or a variety of desserts for display) without corking or cutting fees. In my “potential venues” spreadsheet, they are on the tab for surrounding areas: [...]

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On Locations: Our Wish List

February 21, 2012
On Locations: Our Wish List

Wedding blogs are filled to the brim with gorgeous locations just brimming with all sorts of sprawling oak trees, majestic staircases, rustic barns and glorious vistas. It’s no wonder that when we start to actually look for places to host our own events, we might be a little disappointed. Last February I started sending out requests for information, filling out web forms, and constructing a spreadsheet to house the results. I was casting a fairly wide net, looking both locally and up to 4 hours away just so I wouldn’t miss that potentially-perfect-for-us spot. Turns out, the problem wasn’t finding potential locations, it was getting responses. But more about that later. When looking for a location for anything–wedding party or otherwise–it helps to know what sorts of things you’re looking for. Here is what our preliminary venue list looked like: Room for both ceremony and reception; we didn’t want to have to transport people (or ourselves) more than a few steps between the different parts of the day. Pretty location; the better spot you start with, the less you have to dress it up. Outdoor ceremony, indoor reception area. Not too rustic, not too formal; a bit Goldilocks, but the just [...]

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