A location can make or break your wedding. It’s true.

A great location means all you have to do is show up and it’s gorgeous. Things like manicured gardens and stately old homes fall into this category, and can sometimes be hard to find or outside of your budget.

Instead, most of us are looking for a Good location. One that has enough natural beauty–good bones, you could say–that a few small touches will be enough to make it right for you and yours, but not a completely blank slate.

Todd and I have found our Good location, and no surprise it’s Honey Lake Plantation.

Even though I chuckled a bit because I have a bad habit of falling in love with the first house/car/idea I come across, we really did look at other options, officially and unofficially, but none of them measured up. There are still details to work out, logistics to factor-in, and all the usual event planning schtuff, but by choosing HLP we’ve made things a lot easier on ourselves while securing our wedding in a very pretty place.

This decision came at a price, however. 70% of our budget, to be precise. But that includes location, catering, and lodging for 2 nights, so all-told I think it’s going to be worth it in the long run. We both do, or we wouldn’t have signed on the dotted line, right?

While this does mean I’ll be heavily economizing on some of the other “must-haves” on down the line, it also means I can finally start making my to-diy lists and start planning with a vengence! I mean, it just wasn’t feasible to pick a dress until I knew how much room I’d have to move around in it, what sort of surfaces I’d be traversing and all that jazz. What sort of decorations will be needed heavily depended on the location, too. How many tables will need centerpieces, long, round, or something in between. A lot hanging in the balance.

So YAY! the dreaming has focus, and we, at a shade over 550 days to go, have our location.

Now to figure out… oh, everything else!

Did you feel a tremendous sense of relief when you made the location decision, too?