Another Saturday has come and gone, and with it another September (surprisingly the most popular month for weddings, statistically) of weddings. I'll forever remember September 2017 because it was our wedding month, and I'll forever remember our wedding venue: Verandas Beach House in Manhattan Beach. A bunch of Facebook friends just held their wedding tonight, and I admired their venues from afar (Facebook photos). All seem very nice, and it takes having a wedding to understand all the hard work put into making the wedding look nice and all the fancy amenities people have .
Selecting a wedding venue seems like a fun process because there's so many possibilities (you can hold a wedding almost ANYWHERE) but difficult because you can only have ONE WEDDING! so it's hard to narrow down to one. Here's some observations and advice MJ shared during the venue selection process:
1.) The venue selection process itself is really fun. Go to lots and lots of wedding venues to get a free tour (we did) and imagine yourself at that wedding location. It's almost like having multiple weddings! That hour you spend at the wedding location is about a quarter of the time you spend actually holding the real wedding, just much cheaper.
2.) Know when the sunset times are! September might be most popular because sunset is right around 7PM, when the ceremony transitions to cocktail hour and gives view of a great sunset.
3.) Beach weddings sound like a great idea (Toes in the sand!) but practically not so much (so I've heard) as guests have to take off their shoes, the sand is blowing, have to set up an arch somewhere in the sand, etc. MJ and I instead had our wedding at a beach house NEAR the beach and took wedding pictures at the beach. Genius.
4.) Our original idea was to have a wedding at the National History Museum in LA, among the wooly mammoths, dinosaurs, and blue whales! It was out of our budget, but the videos of other people's weddings were really awesome.
5.) New wedding locations seem nice but there's a lot of benefit to seeing previous weddings at your facility, see what people did and what worked and didn't work. We put a lot of work into seeing other people's weddings and stalking other people's wedding videos/ albums, but it did help when planning our own wedding.
6.) A lot of people make a big deal out of the wedding venue because it's once in a lifetime! One time to shine! But I personally think almost all venues are nice, just get a little bit of sky, outdoor, and nice view. Most people are only outside for the venue for like 10 to 15 minutes now anyway! After that it's cocktail hour in the reception area. What's almost equally important and certainly added up together more important that the aesthetic quality of the venue is the quality of the food, service, parking situation, how long the venue opens for, etc. I've heard of people having weddings in their backyard (we were going to do that if there was a backyard big enough!), weddings on a boat, etc. Honestly, even the county courthouse does a wedding service and they paint a mural of a wedding backdrop on a wall and have people stand in front of it. It actually looks ok!
7.) Most facilities will want you to book in advance of the date and have all kinds of deadlines and deposits due and whatnot, but unless it's like one of the elite landmarks or facilities in the city (which won't be affordable for most people anyway) there's definitely some give and take and bargaining for a lot of facilities: it's like plane tickets, they want you to book ahead of time too. Certain dates will become available if someone drops out, etc. The big numbers though (like 8/8/2008 or 7/7/2007) will fill up quickly. None of those coming up though.
This afternoon while walking near my apartment in downtown I walked by what looked like an abandoned warehouse with a slight opening in an alleyway. I peeked in and lo and behold, there were vendors setting up for a wedding. And it looked very nice inside, despite the outside looking like......an abandoned warehouse. Just another example that you can have the wedding almost ANYWHERE, what matters is the people you spend it with and who you're getting married to.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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