Searching for a Alternate Location

[This is the third time that I am trying to write this post, but I always end up ranting, so hopefully I get it right this time.]

As much as I would LOVE and it is so important to me to have my wedding in a familial backyard, I am not sure that it will work 100%. First of all, there is no rain plan. If it is sprinkling, it wouldn't be a big deal, but if it is raining raining, it would be a very big deal. Second of all, if it is at my mother's house, we would for sure need a shuttle, which is not in our budget, but my mom insists that there will be about 30 cars for 100 people, which I just don't agree with. Third of all, my step father thinks that our septic system wouldn't be able to handle the toilet flushing, so we would need a portable bathroom, which is not in our budget at all. There is very little wiggle room with everything that everyone thinks that we are going to need. It gets overwhelming.

Josh is also very sick of not knowing where the wedding will be. I am too. I have set a goal to know where our wedding will be by the time that I come back to Seattle on December 28th. That means that I will have to look at and decide on a place in two weeks. Josh won't be able to do the initial search with me (he will only be in town for 3 days), so that sucks. I wish he could be with me, but we knew that this would be a problem when we decided to have the wedding in Connecticut.

With that said, I have been scouring the internet for a venue in southern CT where you can have the wedding and ceremony outside, but can also move it inside if need be. There needs to be trees and things like that. It needs to have the "feel" of a backyard wedding. Apparently, these don't exist in southern CT. Apparently, I grew up in the section of CT where there are only wedding factories or wannabe wedding factories. Just when I started to write this I came across the same website for the third time. I am looking at all the same material over and over again!

There was one place that I found, but it is just over our budget, which isn't really great, but it's doable. It's in Norwalk, which isn't too far away and they have lodging there, since it is an inn. It's called The Silvermine Tavern Bed and Breakfast. I am not sure if they do an outside reception and ceremony, I didn't really look at the website too closely, but it looks really cute.

How cute would these chairs be for pictures?

Ah fall. I would love a fall wedding.

I am so sorry that this sounds like a rant (and in a way it is), but I just need some help. I am wondering if anyone has any ideas about where we might be able to have an outdoor wedding at a reasonable price around Orange, CT. I have thought about a state park, but do they usually provide electricity? And will it still feel like my wedding rather than a cool (and expensive) get together?

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!