Wedding Planning

It’ll Be 5:30 Somewhere!

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

Under any other circumstances, mid-morning might be a smidgen early to start serving alcohol, but since it is a wedding and it does fall in the acceptable brunch imbibing zone, I don’t think too many folks will bat an eye at it. Though some will undoubtedly try to ease the social stigma of morning drinking by joking about it being “5 o’clock somewhere.”

(For kicks and giggles I looked it up: it’ll be 5:30 in Greece when our cocktail hour starts.)

Whatever.

For those not quite ready to partake of our signature cocktail (more on that in a minute), we will have other bevvies available, of course!

Honey Lake didn’t really have a brunch-level event package when we booked with them, so that meant we could pretty much cobble together what sounded good to us from their standard event menus. Since they do business retreats and the like, they did have options for breakfasts, so what we did was request the “Free Range Continental”

Assorted Breakfast Pastries and Muffins, Bagels with Cream Cheese, Fresh Whole Fruit, Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice, Freshly-Brewed Regular and Decaf Coffee, Assorted Herbal Teas and Water

but asked to take out the bagels & schmear (a little involved for mingling—breaks the 2-bite rule) and sub for it one of their Display Options: the “Imported and Domestic Artisanal Cheese Board”

Assortment of hard & soft cheeses from around the world, organic fruit, marcona almonds, crafted breads, quince jam, tupelo honey.

for a slight upcharge for the usual continental price.

We’ll have the usual high-top tables scattered around the bend of the fountain circle for people to cluster about (haven’t discussed whether or not there will be chairs set out—I vote no to encourage mingling, but we’ll see), the guest “book” set up on a table in front of the fountain, and an antique desk holding our programs (that will get its own post soon). Both Mr. Road Trip and I will be there greeting our guests and taking some semi-candid photos during that time (having gotten the family formals out of the way just before).

But, of course, it wouldn’t be cocktail hour without a cocktail!

I’m in 100% agreement with the practice of having a signature cocktail to both cut down on bar costs and to personalize the event that much more. And creating cocktails is something I really enjoy doing, so it was a no-brainer that we’d be coming up with something very us for the wedding.

Brunch cocktails usually fall into the Mimosa or Bloody Mary camp, and since our wedding is wine-themed, it makes sense to go with the former and use a sparkling wine as the base for our cocktail. I actually have my own signature drink, The Snarky Tart, that I created years ago and I wanted to include a nod to that, and other flavors that we both enjoy.

This is what our tasting session looked like, trying to figure out which bubbly to use…

Which bubbly will it be? | personal photo

Which bubbly will it be? | personal photo

Oh, the rigors of wedding planning 😉

What did we decide on? Stay tuned…

Thinking Our Way Through the Day

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

Back in high school I had the opportunity to intern with some local event planners and get a behind-the-scenes look at some amazing, large-scale events. I also spent a lot of time reading back issues of Special Events magazine and reading books on running your own catering business, and one of the best pieces of advice I read, one that I’ve used with every party I’ve every hosted or helped with, is to do a mental walk-through of the event from the perspective of the guest to make sure you don’t forget anything.

Depending on how much help you have planning your wedding, you may not need to do such a thorough session yourself, but it never hurts to figure out what questions to ask.

Since a Day-Of Coordinator came with our venue rental, I don’t have to worry about where the garbage cans will be/where discarded plates will go, but I still do this sort of run-through so I can better communicate to her what I see for our day. Since the DoC is there to fulfill our wishes, and knowing we have a few different ideas of how we’d like things to go, it’s up to us to know what we want.

As far as the timeline goes (aka the first hurdle to jump), we worked backwards from “the main event” aka the ceremony at 11:45am to figure out the earlier events. To give the guests time to arrive and us some time to mingle, we decided to start “cocktail” hour 10:30am and start herding guests to the opposite side of the fountain for the ceremony and then process in a somewhat orderly fashion to the reception venue just to the right.

Or, for the more visually minded among us:

HLP Mock-Up

On our last visit there I was happy to see that yes, really, the “front” of the circular drive is deeper than the “back” and that the right offshoot opens up to the driveway which will help channel our guests one way rather than encourage then to wander higglety pigglety hither and yon.

This also tells us that with cocktail hour starting at 10:30, the photographer doesn’t have to arrive until 9:30 or 9:45, which means we Road Trips can actually sleep in til 7 or so before I have to stumble off to the showers to start getting pretty. (Mr. Road Trip, like most grooms, is much more low-maintenance. If it takes him more than 30 minutes to get ready I’ll be shocked!) We’ll technically have our photographer 8 hours, so if we wanted to traipse around for more photographs after the reception we still have that option (though I suspect we’ll be on emotional overload by the time our guests start to leave and want nothing more than some peace and quiet).

Since we’re providing the music ourselves, this also tells us how long our playlists for each portion of the wedding need to be, which our DoC will be pressing play and pause on (one less thing to assign a friend to be in charge of).

And with that done, now it was time to start drilling-down into the details of each part of the day.

Timing Is Everything

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

For our original wedding vision, though the locations and reception menu were in flux, I was pretty much set on a sunset ceremony.

Image via StyleMePretty | Photography by Our Labor of Love

Image via StyleMePretty | Photography by Our Labor of Love

Not only was it very romantic, sunset for our wedding day was predicted at 6:49pm which was just perfect as it was on the clock’s upswing.

Years ago a bride-to-be come into the shop to order her invitations and Mama Leadfoot commented on the very precise time she had written into her wording. It wasn’t just “half past two” or “two thirty in the afternoon” but two thirty-ONE in the afternoon. She explained that her daddy was the luckiest person she ever met and he said getting married while the clock was on an upswing was lucky, so that’s what she was gonna do!

While I’m not overly superstitious, I do think that doing little things like this certainly can’t hurt. For me it’s more about going in with the right intentions and the right mindset, and the clock being on an upswing is a physical reminder of those good intentions.

According to a little bit of Internet research, the clock-upswing superstition is common in China, but seems to have filtered throughout the various cultures. And while the notion seems to focus more on the minute hand, I figured if one hand going up was good, then both would be double-good!

When we switched our wedding from sunset to mid-morning, it became a matter of deciding how early was too early. Neither of the Road Trips are the cheeriest morning people, so too early wasn’t a great idea, not to mention asking our guests to be up bright and early wouldn’t be the most hospitable thing. Mid-morning seemed like a good idea, but we also knew that most of our guests would be driving about 45 minutes to get to our venue, which could make an even a mid-morning start a bit touchy.

Good thing we were already thinking it’d be fun to have the cocktail hour before the ceremony, so that gives us some wiggle room if people aren’t really up and moving as early as need be. (Not to mention gives us plenty of time to get ready in the morning without having to get up at the crack of dawn.) And since I never had any intention of hiding away in some bridal lounge before the ceremony, it also gives us plenty of time to greet our guests, take some photos, and generally make merry before the ceremony.

How did you determine the timing of your wedding?

74 Bottles of Wine on the Wall…

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

And on the tables and on the floor and anywhere else I can think to put them!

Like I said, after our planning meeting I felt way more confident about proceeding with our DIY decoration list (that is rather long and involved, I must say). Since most of my centerpiece and decoration ideas involve wine bottles, I first needed to sit down and figure out just how many we were going to need to get everything done.

Grand total: 74 bottles.

After I tallied everything up it occurred to me that there will be more wine bottles than guests at this wedding. And that’s not counting the ones we’ll be bringing to serve during the reception. For whatever reason this fact still makes me giggle. Perhaps these wedding plans have me a bit punch drunk?!

Now, I’d been stock-piling empty wine bottles for a while and they were hanging out in my home studio for years (making a few moves with me and everything) but even I wasn’t sure if I had enough saved up or if we’d need to get to the boozing pqd! Never fear, I had plenty of all sizes, shapes, and colors, the only thing they needed before we could start to cut (about 25 of them are going to be used in parts) and decorate them was to get all those labels off!

A smarter Road Trip would have been removing labels as each bottle was emptied, but I kept putting this task off thinking that I wanted to save all of them for craft projects. Save, schmave, it was time to clear these bottles and we were going to get them all done in one fell swoop!

jwalker_ttb_winebottles_tubbed copy

Step 1: Commandeer a couple of extra-deep storage totes from the garage and bring them out to the back deck. A bit of regular dish-washing liquid in the bottom and then I loaded in as many bottles as would stand up comfortably in the space.

jwalker_ttb_bottles_soaking copy

Step 2: Just add water! If I were doing this for only a few bottles I could have used a smaller container and hot water, but for the sake of time and volume, I just went with whatever temperature came out of the hose. Which was cold. I know this because filling up the tubs wasn’t enough–to keep the contents from playing bumper bottles (and, therefore, not keeping the labels submerged) you have to also partially fill said bottles and that tends to cause some blow-back. I was just shy of drenched after this step.

jwalker_ttb_bottles_secondbatch copy

Step 3: Now here’s the fun part. Once the bottles have had a chance to soak a bit, choose one and try to lift off the label. Sometimes the angels will sing and it will come off easily. Most of the time, no matter how long you let them soak, that’s not gonna happen. After a few reluctant labels I went and hunted up a putty knife and that helped quite a bit. I also had some steel wool handy as even the easy labels tended to leave a bit of residue that the steel wool made quick work of. After a quick rinse I put them into the recycle bins (emptied the day before, how convenient!) to dry off a bit.

jwalker_ttb_winebottles_cleaning copy

Step 4: Repeat as necessary, starting with fresh soap and water for each batch. I ended up doing 2 1/2 batches of bottles over the course of 4.5 hours. I also found myself incredibly sore for the next few days from the odd positions I found myself in trying to get those Bacchus-forsaken bottles cleaned. Once they dried outside for a while I dragged them inside and (eventually) boxed them all up by size and shape.

All in all I ended up cleaning 96 bottles and only sorta broke one of them while cleaning because one bottle slipped out of my hands and landed on the neck of another. But even then I was able to salvage the chipped one–I need a few that will be cut down to the bottom half only with the tops unaccounted for (as yet).

Some labels (Jones soda, this side-eye is for you) were incredible pains in the ass as they used a heavy-duty adhesive that just seemed to spread like the blob when scrubbed. Those will require Goo Gone or something similar to really get clean (and, yes, I have some smaller bottles in the mix for use in certain decoration configurations). The winner for easiest labels to soak off, though, goes to Perrier–they were an absolute dream to lift off in one piece.

A couple of other things I learned while fighting the upcycled decoration battle:

  • Champagne/Sparkling wine-style labels will fight you. Why? The bottlers know you’re going to likely set them into an ice bucket, etc. and don’t want the labels to be a peeling mess in the middle of your evening. Most of these labels have a water-resistant coating on them, therefore, and will take more work to remove. Consider yourself warned. White wine bottles come in second-hardest for many of the same reasons. (I don’t remember buying so many bottle of Oak Leaf Chardonnay in my life but I know I cleaned about a half dozen of them!)
  • Any labels with metallic foil (common on liquor bottles, but some wine labels used them, too) will be less prone to peel and more prone to disintegrate into a mealy, pulpy mess but only once due force has been applied.
  • It might be a good idea to remove any foil wraps left on the neck of the bottles before they get all wet and soapy, otherwise you’ll need to let them dry before you can cut them off. They usually aren’t glued, just heat-shrunk into place.

Mama Leadfoot asked why I insisted on doing them all at once and, honestly? If I’d planned on only doing half of them that day I don’t think I would have done the rest of them. It was better to get them over with!

Did you tackle any projects at one go that you knew you’d never finish if you parceled them out?

Our First Planning Day

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

One of the downsides to booking our venue and the DoC that came with it, is there was a looong gap between reserving it (April 2012) and any planning meetings for the event which start at 6 months out.

More than ready to get this show on the road, I emailed our contact (who was also our DoC) this April to set up that first planning session. Imagine my alarm when the email bounced back as a non-existent address. Realizing that staff changes could have happened in the past year, I didn’t panic too much until I resent the email to the main weddings@ address and it came back as restricted!

Now, rationally I knew that we had a signed contract and they’d take our deposit, so there was no way we weren’t having our wedding at HLP. But rational thought is not always driving this bus–sometimes I think my brain has this worst case scenario blanket over the top of it as I always seem to jump to it and play through the what-ifs for hours. I’ve done this throughout my life so I’m used to it, and at times I think it helps me be prepared for when things actually do go awry, but it was a few tense days, waiting for someone to return my calls, worrying that in the transition our contract had been overlooked and the venue might have been double-booked in the last year.

Bride Brain illustration by Miss Road Trip

illustration by Miss Road Trip

Turns out our original contact had opted not to return after her maternity leave (which, hey, more power to her) and that the current event planner just hadn’t gotten down to us on her list of folks to contact. Now, I’m still pretty irked that we weren’t notified of the personnel change since it does affect us, but after talking with our new planner, Stephanie, I felt much more at ease. Whew!

Meeting set, and scheduled for the only Saturday in May that there wasn’t a wedding going on there, I wondered why it’d take 2 hours for this meeting considering how much we’d already discussed with the former planner via emails, etc. before we signed the contract.

Well, folks, count 2 strikes for the former event planner because she left the incoming staff no. information. whatsoever. As in, when we sat down with Stephanie all she had was a copy of our contract, not even the proposal (with all the details) that the contract was based upon. And there was no way to get into the former planner’s email records either.

Grrrr

Good thing I’m also the type to over prepare, just in case of situations like this!

Unfortunately, more than just the staff had changed since we booked Honey Lake for our wedding.

  • We weren’t the first couple to have been promised colored table linens at no extra charge, but since it was’t specifically in our contract and just a verbal agreement, it wasn’t one we could make stick. So now we’re looking into rentals vs buying outright.
  • Thankfully we did have the BYO wine and signature cocktail written into the contract, because they no longer allow that! Still, we’ve opted to go with them providing the beer on-consumption for the guests that prefer that over the wine we’re providing. And while they do require bartenders these days, they also provide them at no extra charge, so that works out all the way around.
  • They’d also asked if we would be willing to change our lodging option from the Obo Suite (little 1-bedroom quarters attached to the main lodge) to one of the Pines cottages. While I wasn’t super-thrilled to give up the suite, the cottage does give us more getting ready room (2, 2-bed rooms, each with full baths) plus a sitting room but it’s slightly less charming and sort of overkill on the beds (it sleeps 8!). Still, they were concerned that the hunting party that rented the lodge for that weekend might make our stay less that serene, and I can appreciate that.
  • And on the very good front, they’ve now added sound system support for the grounds–originally it was only available in the main event spaces and the chapel. The fee for using their system is probably double of what renting the Passport system and speakers we were planning on, but the lack of hassle having to pick up/set up/break down/return the equipment ourselves is worth the convenience fee.

Oh, and it turns out we’re actually allowed to hang stuff on the walls! Bonus!

The main thing I wanted–no, NEEDED!–to get out of this meeting was table information. See, for months I felt like I was spinning my wheels on some big projects because I couldn’t really see how everything was going to go together. So once we walked the spaces with numbers in mind and started talking about specifics, I was galvanized into action by the time we got home and started revising my lists that night. Finally I knew how many centerpieces I needed and how many tables we would have for the cocktail hour and just where everything would be.

And a good thing, too, because suddenly our long (28 month) engagement is down to just under 4 months and I’m not sure I could have survived any more waiting around!

Did you have to deal with any panic-inducing moments from your venue or other vendors?