A few weeks ago I met up with Jenn, one of my brides from last summer, and asked if she would be willing to share her wedding planning story with you all. To my delight she said yes! And then she wrote a lot more than I expected. So I have broken up her story  into two posts. Today she writes about how her idea of the perfect location evolved from her initial idea into a reality. Something that I think a lot of brides have to come to terms with. Also, if you would like to know a bit more about Jenn, head on over to her own blog Blush and Bees, where she chronicles gardening and other horticultural adventures on Vancouver Island.  

Last year Eric and I started along the journey of planning a wedding. At first, I had very romantic notions about the ceremony and party that I wanted (Eric was easy, for him the only thing was no church). I wanted an outdoor ceremony, preferably in a forest or overlooking the ocean, at night or dusk, preferably under the full moon, followed by a backyard/house party reception. This to me was the ideal wedding. Casual, romantic, unique, outdoors and simple, family and friends oriented. This obviously did not take into consideration any logistics howsoever and maybe if I had been more headstrong, more brave, I would have tried to see it through. But, upon mentioning my ideas to the older women in my life, I was met with lots of head-shakes and doubts.

“What if it rains?”

“Your Grandma won’t be able to make the hike into a forest, or up a hill.”

“Where will people sit?”

“Will everyone stand for the whole ceremony?”

“And what about photos? It will be too dark for good ceremony photos.”

So the woody/hillltop/night ceremony idea was thrown out the window. We thought about an outdoor daytime ceremony, but just couldn’t figure out where we could go with 100 people and whether we were willing to chance the weather (we were aiming for a late August or September wedding). Next it was the reception. Eric and I rolled this around in our heads for quite some time. Who did we know with a big enough house to have a proper reception? I have a very large family so we knew that the guest list was going to be close to, or over 100 people. We thought, ok we don’t know anyone with a nice big house and beautiful garden, let’s just have it at our house! Again we were met with the logistics.

From the parentals:

“You only have one bathroom, you’ll have to rent a porta-potty” (gross)

“Will you rent a tent for outside?”

“Who will cater?”

“Will they do all the clean-up too?”

“How about the neighbors and noise bylaws?”

“Do you really want the headache of having the wedding at your own house?”

The list went on… Maybe a more creative person would have found a way around this, someone who was more in-tune with alternative wedding sites and options, Eric and I however, had only been to a few weddings, and they were all pretty by-the-book or extremely low-key involving few guests and a nice big house with an established garden. More and more it seemed that logistics were really determining what kind of wedding we were going have, and not our/my romantic notions of casual house-party style festivities.

So after we got that through our heads, we decided to hunt for “proper” venues. We knew we wanted something with a homey feel so we started looking at B&B’s and wineries. Unfortunately, all of the B&B’s we looked at had a very low guest limit or a very high price. Wineries proved to be too restrictive with liquor rules, and that’s when we finally ended up visiting Sea Cider Farm and Ciderhouse. We liked the atmosphere right away. Small-ish, barn-ish, an outdoor reception area, a beautiful orchard, and a lovely wrap-around deck. We loved the big wooden harvest tables and the idea of having an “Apple Wedding”. After we talked with the event coordinator, we were pretty much sold. Sea Cider knew how to do weddings and we needed solid guidance. We decided to have the ceremony and reception at Sea Cider since we thought one stop for guests was pretty convenient. And since our ceremony time was later than most traditional ceremonies, 5:30pm, we could go right from ceremony to dinner to party. Perfect.

Check in next week for the rest of Jenn’s story!