Member- Yak
- 4 years ago
Hi, Bees.
Long story short, our venue is closing next month, leaving us in the lurch for our July wedding. Already sent save the dates citing suburb as wedding location, but it might be in the city, 30 minutes away. Do we need to let guests know/send new save the dates?
Here goes the vent:
We booked a country club for our ceremony and reception for our July 2015 wedding, put deposits on photographer, DJ, and shuttle for guests, blocked hotels, sent save the dates, and we were generally in good shape…and then…a friend texts us about an article he saw in the local newspaper that our venue is closing effective December 2014. SO immediately called the banquet manager at the venue and left a voicemail. Played phone tag for the next 2 days, before I finally talked to him. It’s true, they sent a check refunding our 1k deposit. He says, sorry, you can try these 4 places – which we did. None of them have our date available.
Over the last few days, I’ve non-discriminately contacted upwards of 30 venues, 8 of which have our date available. None of them are comparable to the venue we had. We were pretty much at the top of our preferred budget at our venue, but it included ceremony, a variety of hors d’oevres, bar for 5 hours, soup, salad, entree, dessert, and use of 3 rooms and a spacious patio. We would be the only wedding on site.
Now, the only other country club available in the area has only a patio space available, and we wouldn’t be able to have the ceremony there because it would be “too loud” with the DJ from the other wedding that’s booked that day. We also looked at a couple banquet halls, but they are so generic and we would having our wedding with 4 other weddings in the same space.
The only venue we saw yesterday that we liked (we visited 6 of the 8) is a small upscale hotel in downtown mid-sized city. (Our venue and blocked hotels were in the suburbs, about 30 minutes away.) This venue is $20-30 per person over our budget and you don’t get as much included because it’s a swanky place. The max capacity is 2 less than our invite list, so even though not everyone will come, it will probably be crowded. We can’t get married there unless it’s sunny and cool, as there’s no inside contingency for bad weather. They don’t do tastings, and we would have to block new hotels and find someplace else for the ceremony and then figure out transportation as well.
This is just overwhelming. I didn’t like wedding planning before, and now I have to do it all over again. I KNOW this could have been much worse. No one died, we didn’t break up, the wedding is still 8 months away…but this just sucks!
