Reception Hall Nightmares

I am doing my best to keep this blog relatively normal. That is to say, I don't want this to become a wedding blog. However, I am getting married and the planning is slowly ruining my life so, sometimes, I'm going to have to talk about it.

Today, I finally got some good news on the wedding front. I found a place in Schaumburg - I've been to two weddings there but the last one was in, like, 2000 and the one before that was 1998, so I don't remember it super-well - in any case, the price per person is roughly half of what I've seen elsewhere.

Seriously. Almost HALF.

That means that, if the place is nice - obviously if it looks and tastes like it was half-off, we won't have it there - we can now afford a band and flowers and the fancy-schmancy photographer that I've fallen in love with. Goodness. I would love to be able to have a band instead of a DJ.

The whole goal of my wedding is for people to have a good time. So, the food just has to be good - it doesn't have to knock your socks off, just be tasty and not remarkably bad. The really important things are as follows:

1. The music needs to rock. Good mix of genres and time periods, keep up the pace, but play enough slow tunes too.
2. The dance floor has to be big enough. My family likes to dance and I plan on shakin' my groove 'thang, if you know what I mean. Nothing worse than a too-small dance floor.
3. The booze needs to flow freely. Few things can damper the night like the bar running out, closing too soon, or lines being too long. With the cheaper site, I might even spring for two bars.

Ultimately, I want people to remember my wedding as a really good party.

One of the venues that we were considering called me this morning because I e-mailed an attempt to negotiate the price. She informed me that their minimum for an October wedding is $17,000. Seriously. Seventeen Grand. That's a lot of money. When I told her that that was too much, she said she'd work on it. I was like "we might have to just rule you out" and she says she wants until the end of the day to see what she can do. She suggested moving the wedding to November. But I want a fall wedding, not a winter one, and I don't want to worry about flights getting in, people being cold etc etc. "Usually" the weather is nice early in November. Sometimes it isn't. I don't want to risk it. So, this lady is going to see what she can do. I seriously doubt she's going to be able to cut that minimum in half, but we'll see.