Engaged, Now What

When we got engaged we learned quickly that wedding planning in Chicago wasn’t going to be an easy task. We planned for a year in a half engagement so that we could save up as much as we possibly could.

Our first step in wedding planning was figuring out the guest list. After estimating, we thought that would allow us to move forward with picking a venue. Our list started with about 300+ but after browsing venues and costs we thought we had better trim the list. And so we did. By half.

We hurt some feelings, a lot of feelings. We heard about it from friends and family later but paying for a wedding during a recession is not an easy thing to do. We cut the list down by saying no kids. We did invite some kids that were close family, but other than that, no kids. The other thing we did is we said no dates. If you weren’t married, engaged, living together or in a seriously committed long term relationship…no date. It may have caused some hurt feelings but when you're talking $100+ for someone you don't even know times like 10+, is it really worth it? Our feelings weren't hurt so we stuck with our decisions.

From there, looking at venues seemed a lot less daunting, although still not easy. Some places give you one head count and it includes everything (food, linens, cake, taxes, ect.) other places give you a cost per seat, a cost per this and you have to add everything together. It was super important for us (and we assume everyone) that we knew ALL the cost up front. After weeding places out based on numbers in books, we set out venue hunting.

When looking for a venue, we were looking for a place to hold an outdoor ceremony and an indoor reception. We figured, in the case of bad weather, having something in doors would help make for a great rainy day back up plan. We were fortunate to have a beautiful sunny wedding day, but it ended up being one of the hottest most humid days of 2009. We were grateful to have an indoor reception for the reasoning of the air conditioning.

We made our first stop to a golf course I worked at in high school. After getting a tour of the facility, getting a quick walk through of the ceremony to the reception the hubs and I were sold! Since we did so much research on paper, we felt confident with our quick decision based on only seeing one site. Plus we thought having a June wedding (busy wedding month) would be impossible to get the date we wanted. The date we wanted was actually the last Saturday they had open in June. DONE AND DONE.

Thus we got the out door wedding we wanted.