I thought you guys might like to hear a bit more about Ameleah’s wedding…
From Ameleah…
We saved a lot by thinking outside the box when it came to finding our ceremony and reception locations. I wanted an outdoor garden wedding. We looked at a lot of venues, but most had steep site fees and none of them really wowed us. My husband’s family offered to host our ceremony in their back yard and it was perfect, a beautiful, personal location with no site fee! We ended up having our reception at my husband’s favorite Irish pub. The pub is in a gorgeous historic building with high ceilings, wood floors and lovely details. I love historic homes and can’t imagine living in a modern space so this fit my personality perfectly. We had the entire top floor for the day, it included tables, chairs, basic white linens and there was no site fee! It isn’t your typical wedding venue, but we were willing to be flexible and it saved us a lot of money.
We served our guests horse d oeuvres, a delicious three course plated meal and had an open bar. I’ll be honest, we probably didn’t receive the level of service that we would have gotten from a venue that does hundreds of weddings a year. We had to be very specific in what we wanted, double and triple check everything and their attention to detail wasn’t the greatest, but I am probably the only person that noticed the tables were not set up correctly or that the servers didn’t come around to offer wine before the main course was served.
We kept our guest list small. We only invited our families and closest friends. This whittled the guest list down to 90 people. It was tough at times because our parents frequently wanted to add great aunt so and so or their good friend from college, but we wouldn’t budge on this. I love that we had a close, personal relationship with every single person at our wedding.
We took a chance and hired a wedding photographer that was just starting out. I know this is something that many people wouldn’t be willing to do, but we really liked our photographer and we ended up with some very good pictures and a lot of pretty good pictures. There are certainly moments when I wish we would have splurged on a high end photographer that could have given us more polished images, but this is undeniably one of the elements that made it possible for us to stay within our budget.
