Saturday, March 8, 2008

Location, location, location

So, our original plan was a stroke of genius on my part...well I thought so!!

We had hoped to keep the wedding to about 75 people max. My amazing idea was that seeing we had a lot of out of towners coming to the wedding, and that we really wanted to keep it pretty laid back and casual (so very us!) we would look at renting a house for the week surrounding the wedding. Prerequisites for the house were:

1. On or very close to the beach
2. Large outdoor space for cocktails/h'ordeuvres after the ceremony
3. Enough space to sleep at least 10-12 family and friends for the week

I really thought this was genius. There are so many amazing houses in South Florida that aren't occupied in Off Season (May - Nov) and I really thought it would be great to have a "wedding HQ" so to speak - location for the rehearsal dinner, somewhere for the girls to get ready, somewhere for the day after brunch, and a few days of R&R by a pool after the insanity. Brilliant right? Yeah, right...

Turns out we have about 140 people on the list at the moment...of course there ARE people on the list who will not come to FL for the event, they'll either wait for the Australia wedding, or send apologies. However, I can't bank on that, and really I can't imagine more than 20 people declining at this stage. So, we looked at much larger houses - and yes they do exist, however spending $8-12,000 for a week on the location...I don't think so!

I also had a brilliant idea for the catering which was not to be...using the local culinary schools! They all have to complete a certain number of practical credits in order to graduate, and you can often get chefs, servers etc for the cost of the food/beverages + tip. Would have been sweet ;)

Never mind. New idea time.

We still wanted to do the ceremony on the beach, and have a casual reception afterwards AND neither of us wanted the hotel type wedding reception. So. Casual, but nice restaurants on the water seemed like a good option. The problem was, this looked set to blow our budget completely out of the water. Restaurants that were asking a minimum of $70 a head for appetisers! And that would not even include the bar! OUCH...

But as chance would have it, I lucked out. Here is our perfect wedding location:



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