TMAYW: The Venue

This is a part of a series of blog posts about my wedding and the planning process, called Tell Me About Your Wedding (TMAYW) – to catch up, view all of the posts here.

Personally, I think that the venue is a pretty key part to a wedding. Your venue will give off a certain vibe to your guests, and sets the mood. If that’s important to you, like it was to us, then you’ll want to put a lot of thought into where you get married.

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For us, once we settled on the location, everything really started to fall into place. I can’t tell you how many venues I considered, but I’m fairly sure I came across just about every wedding venue in DC and Virginia (and even Maryland) during my search! I used WeddingWire, The Knot, Facebook, Instagram, numerous wedding blogs, and even plain old Google to look for wedding venues. I typed up lists, made a binder, and scratched out overview pages on every venue we were seriously considering. I sent tons of inquiry emails, got freaked out over prices, and in the end, only visited about four wedding sites. The tours were exciting, since they let us imagine all of the possibilities of each unique site, but I definitely felt the pressure of expectations from some of the event managers. Not to say we felt pressured into making any rash decisions, but they all clearly have deadlines and want to book their sites up as quickly and smoothly as possible. As it turned out, we had what was considered a short timeline for planning, mostly due to the time of year we got married (August) and the in-demand location (DC area). I mean really though – a year is a short timeline?! The wedding industry has a bit of a skewed point of view, but more on that later…

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TELL ME ABOUT YOUR WEDDING

After four wonderful years together, Ben and I got married on August 9, 2015 at Whitehall Estate in Bluemont, Virginia. It was one of the best days of my life!!

We got engaged in August 2014 and started wedding planning around November 2014. We wanted a simple, personal wedding, and worked hard to make that happen with the support of our families and friends. Planning the wedding was incredibly exciting, but a little overwhelming, and I’m glad to be done with it and moving on to the next big thing in our lives.

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HEY THIS HAPPENED

WE GOT MARRIED!!!!!!!!!!!!!

August 9, 2015 ranks pretty damn high as one of the best days of my life. Ben and I exchanged vows (that we wrote ourselves) in front of 100 of our closest friends and family members. We got married and had the reception at Whitehall Manor in Bluemont, Virginia. Everything came together wonderfully and we are so happy – it’s been a week and a half and we still can’t stop grinning ear-to-ear!

Four days after the wedding, we moved out to Dayton, Ohio, which is where we will be for the next few years. Ben is currently stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and is attending graduate school with the Air Force Institute of Technology here for a year and a half. His next assignment might be here in Ohio as well, so we’re excited to start putting down some roots. We’re staying in temporary housing on base (and counting the days) until we can move into the perfectawesomebeautifulamazing house in Kettering, Ohio that we just signed the lease on yesterday! I’m still looking for a job, but I know I’ll find something I enjoy doing soon enough. We are quickly finding our favorite parts of Dayton and already have coffee shops we’re planning on being regulars at. Before we moved here, people kept mentioning how nice Ohioans (Buckeyes?? I don’t know what to call them) are, and that is definitely true so far. We are being welcomed with open arms and I’m really looking forward to the next few years here!

I’ll write a more in-depth post about the details of our wedding and the vendors we worked with when we get the rest of the pictures back from our photographer! By the way, our photographer is the best photographer in the world and everyone should hire her. All photo credit goes to her!

Thanks for reading! ~Margaret