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.
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…
