Venues

Happy Monday everyone! Hope you all had a good weekend. I wish that the weekend was longer. All the Mondays that I don't work I wish Josh was home to keep me company!

So our wedding will definitely be in the Summer of 2013. We need some time to save up some money and figure out where we are going to be in life. But I am excited because we have (what seems like) all the time in the world to search for the best deals and decide what exactly it is that we want.

There is just one thing wrong with time: I want to do it now! I have been doing research and I love all the little parts of planning a wedding, such as the invitations, favors, decorations, flowers, etc. But I am not looking forward to all the research and work to put into choosing where to have the wedding, who the photographer will be, and what kind of caterer will be in our price range. It is so frustrating because I want  to start visualizing the wedding in my mind, but I can't do that if I have so many options! But as Josh constantly reminds me, we are lucky to have so many options. (He is slightly sick of me hemming and hawing over where to have our wedding. Yes, already. I tend to lay it on kinda thick.) So we have a few options of venues.

Option 1:

My mother's backyard. They just put in a nice big deck and have a nice layout for the wedding, but I would like somehting a little more woodsy and there aren't many trees in the yard. There are plenty around the sides of the property, but I wanted something a little more ... enclosed. One thing that would be kinda cool is that maybe we could go into the field behind my parent's house for the ceremony.

The downsides of this location is parking. There is NO parking around my house. I live on a slightly busy street so we wouldn't be able to park up and down the sides of the street. It's a pretty big con, but maybe some people will have some suggestions! I also think of my parent's house as a laid back place where people go to have a couple beers and burgers. That's awesome, and it's something that I love about my parent's house, but not for my wedding. But then again, maybe I could get used to it. Who knows.

Option 2:

My grandmother's backyard. They have a lot of beautiful gardens and huge trees that provide lots of shade, so having a middle-of-the-summer wedding wouldn't be completely dreadfully hot. It has the general feeling that I want for my wedding: laid back, but still a wedding.

The downside is that there is only one bathroom inside the house on the lower level. This is more fixable than the parking problem at my mother's house, such as asking family to use the upstairs bathroom and making signs for guests. That's really the only downside, though they have less flat land, but that is also easier to work around.

Option 3:

An outside location. I am thinking maybe a house or something like that. I have a story of someone in San Francisco who nabbed an estate on craigslist for under $3,000 that included all the tables, chairs, china, glassware, etc. So if I can find something like that, it would be excellent, because the second most expensive thing of the backyard wedding is the rentals.

The downside of this: still need to pay for a caterer, which is more expensive than I can imagine.

Anyways, that's what I have been struggling with over the weekend. I am not sure if a banquet hall is for us, but I am open to looking. I just don't want this to go on forever! I would like to get to the fun part of the wedding planning! Any suggestions for me to get the crazies out of my head? Have a great Monday!