Wedding Plans Get Underway
So after popping the question a couple of weeks ago it’s taken us a while to get going on the wedding plans, mainly because the fiancée has been working every weekend since we got back from holiday.
It looks as though we’re going to try and go ahead with it this year and so need to get everything sorted out pretty quickly. 6 months isn’t a long time to get so much done, especially if this is supposed to be one of the most stressful things you’ll ever do!
So with all this in mind, we spent a lot of time last week looking at loads of different venues (and I mean “loads”), trying to find somewhere that either looked a bit quirky or really special, while also not being too expensive! We got a list of about 6 places and put plans in place to visit them. As the other half was off work on Friday I also took the day off, with the plan being to visit as many places as we could. (I won’t mention any place by name just yet as we want to keep things a surprise until we’ve chosen a definite venue and date)
Venue 1 was our quirky selection. Inside the venue everything was really nice and the photos we’d seen backed this up. However it was let down by it’s outside. One thing we both want is a place with lots of places outside to take photographs, as these are the permanent keepsake from the big day. This place was a big let down in this department, there wouldn’t be many photographs being taken!
Venue 2 was a hotel and so the added bonus here was that there would be rooms available for our guests to stay in afterwards. It was a really nice place (great grounds) and it had a bit of quirkiness about it. The only let down was it’s conference-type, plain room where the wedding breakfast would be held. It would require a bit of work to make it “special”.
Venue 3 was a dedicated wedding venue and while the grounds were absolutely gorgeous (great photo opportunities unlike at Venue 1) the reception room was probably too big for our needs, and there was nowhere for guests to stay, hotels would have to be booked separately.
Venue 4 was a country manor house and again the grounds were lovely and guests could stay in a hotel nearby. However the reception room was a bit…well…loud, for want of a better word. An interesting colour, it would mean a lot of careful planning around our own plans for colour scheme coordination.
We then headed off to look for a place that we had heard about but could find no information about on the internet (weird in this day and age), but couldn’t gain access to the grounds. well, actually, we couldn’t find it! After a quick call to check to see if it was OK to have look round we headed back down the M20 to Venue 6.
As we drove into the grounds the fiancée let out a “wow that’s pretty” which was a good sign! A huge country manor, the building was really picturesque and quirky. However as we walked through the building we were once again let down by the reception room, this time it was too old fashioned!
After a stroll around the grounds we jumped back into the car and headed home, with a hundred and one things going round in our heads. Were we being too picky? Should we be taking into account if people want to stay overnight? Would we find one place that had everything?
One positive that we took from all this was that all the venues had availability between July and November, albeit quite limited dates dotted around here and there. we could have had the wedding as early as the 16th July! So finding a date may not be as tricky as we first thought!
