After Ryan and I got engaged, I asked him when he was thinking he would like to get married. I thought he would say March or April 2013 (about a year from engagement) but instead he said November 2012 (only 7 months). Aahh! So soon! Could we even find a venue for that soon? Over the past couple weeks we have been scouring through venues looking for something that holds enough people and is in our budget (and is pretty and has good food, haha). There was one place I liked but it was at the max end our budget and meant I would be paying for quite a bit of the costs out of my own pocket. Plus they didn’t have any Saturday availability until May 2013. So we kept looking and looking but we couldn’t really find any other venues. Some were private clubs only open to members, many held a maximum of 100 people (we need at least 125) and some were just too expensive (over $150 per person before tax and gratuity). We decided to consider doing an outdoor wedding with a tent similar to Nate & Kayla’s wedding we just attended.
We started pricing out rentals for tents, tables, chairs, chair covers, linens, china/flatware/glassware, dance floor, and all the other requirements and by the time we added the cost of drinks and catering (plus taxes and delivery fees) it was going to cost us almost as much as having it at a hotel. Plus we would need a wedding coordinator at least for the day of to do the setup, coordinate with all the vendors and do the tear down. If you do the wedding at a city park you can’t set up the day before or tear down the day after – it all has to be done the same day. Obviously I wouldn’t want to get up super early on my wedding day, go set up all the tents and tables and wait for vendors and then only have a couple hours to get ready and get to my wedding. And then we would still have to tear everything down and clean up right after the wedding. I was also pretty concerned about the weather. I didn’t want to spend the day miserable because it was too hot or too cold, or windy or rainy. Plus if it were to rain at all it could be muggy and the bugs might all be out. I know it could come out wonderfully (especially with the help of a planner) but the possibility of it being a complete disaster would make me a wreck the whole week of and I’d rather at least attempt to be calm. LOL. Also, at a park you have to use the park/public bathrooms – who wants to use a gross public bathroom in a fancy dress? And not all the parks have an electricity hookup so you would have to rent a generator. There are fees for the city permit to use the park and to consume alcohol on the park, and they require you to purchase a liability insurance policy that will cover up to $2million. Needless to say, the fees and costs kept adding up so quickly that it would have cost almost the same amount as having it at a fancy hotel and would be a lot more stressful for me. So now we are leaning away from that option. The only reason we were really considering it is because we couldn’t find availability when we wanted. But many of the photographers and DJ’s are also booked for most of the Saturday’s this year so it might have been hard to find all the vendors we need anyways.
The more I thought about it, the more I liked Vero Beach Hotel & Spa. Ryan came down to Vero on his last off Friday and we went there for lunch. He really liked the place too and the food was really good (as usual). The atmosphere of the restaurant is a little formal but has beautiful views of the ocean and the ceremony would be on the patio overlooking the water. Plus you can have your cocktail hour on the patio watching the waves and when it gets dark they can probably light up the fire pits on the patio. For a wedding of more than 80 people you buy out the entire restaurant so the patio and restaurant would be empty except for us. I contacted them looking for more availability but was having a hard time at first. The only dates they had were Friday 10/19 (way too soon and during hurricane season is a little risky), Saturday 12/22 (Christmas weekend) or Saturday 5/4 (a little farther away than we were hoping for). Then they contacted me and said they might have an opening 11/10 because a bride was going to move her wedding – I was so excited but she ended up keeping the 11/10 date so we still didn’t have any ideas. At this point I wanted to have the wedding there badly enough to wait until May but I was still hoping something might open up. Then they said they had a contract fall through for Friday 12/7. That’s not exactly what we were thinking since it is between thanksgiving and Christmas travels but it is a reasonable amount of time until then and we might have an easier time finding vendor availability on a Friday. We were trying to keep the wedding on a Saturday because I know it’s hard for people in the wedding party to come to a Thursday night rehearsal. Plus everyone traveling for the wedding either has to come in the day of the wedding (and take Friday off work) or come on Thursday and miss two days of work. All of my family will be traveling to get here since none live nearby. But there is only so much I can do to accommodate everyone…at some point we are limited by our venue availability, budget, our schedule, etc. So I wrote the Vero Beach Hotel & Spa back to tell them we want the 12/7 date and we are supposed to schedule a meeting soon. We haven’t signed a contract yet so it isn’t set in stone but we finally have a tentative wedding date of 12/7 in Vero Beach, FL.
Since we will be maxing out (or going over) our initial budget to host the wedding at this venue I will be trying to do as many things myself as possible (instead of buying them). So I’d say I will have a busy summer ahead. Anyone want to scour goodwill’s for centerpiece decorations with me? Haha. Ok I’ll try to keep the wedding posts to a minimum since this is my sewing blog but I have to keep you guys updated. Hopefully my posting will become more regular again as things go back to normal (sort of).
