We Have A Venue & A Date – Wedding Wednesday

Planning a wedding or attempting to plan a wedding during a pandemic….wow is it hard! I talked about it a bit on instagram stories (there’s a whole engagement highlight saved) and wrote a little in this blog post, if you need a refresher. For us the biggest struggle has been picking a venue and a date. At first we got engaged and jumped straight into wedding planning. We already had a timeline in mind (mid to late summer) and were working toward that. Finding a venue we liked and could afford seemed difficult, and then the entire world shut down. That sounds like I’m being dramatic, but literally the world has shut down!

So at first what we thought it just was going to be difficult finding a venue. We were able to see venues before the full stay at home order was put into place, which looking back now was a real blessing. However, after the world shut down it became clear the next difficult part was going to be deciding when to have the wedding. To move forward with the timeline we originally had planned or to postpone before we even got to begin.

At this point, I think almost everyone knows someone who’s wedding has had to be postponed. Both Adam and I have friends who’s weddings were in May who’s weddings will not take place. Our hearts totally break for them. The dilemma we faced was we hadn’t booked vendors or a venue yet. We were in talks with all of them, but no money was placed. Everyone else was having to postpone weddings had planned their wedding not knowing there was going to be a chance they’d have to postpone. For us though, we would be planning a wedding, asking our guests to make plans, all with the chance of postponement and uncertainty on the line. This fact mattered a lot to us and we really considered our guests in our choice.

None of this has been an easy decision. I want to add in that Adam’s work schedule makes things very tricky. Before we got engaged we knew our options would be the summer of 2020, or the summer of 2021. A world pandemic doesn’t change our options. Unlike others if this summer doesn’t happen than we can’t postpone until fall or spring. We just automatically have to wait until next summer, as he’d be in cross country and track season.

With all that being said, we’ve made the choice to still try for late July early August!

Like I said it wasn’t an easy choice, and we know there is a chance we’ll have to postpone until next summer. However, ultimately we needed to chose the date that was best for us as a couple and that’s this summer for multiple reasons. Our plan is to call the wedding if things don’t seem better by June and if our county and state bans aren’t lifted by then. We are choosing to take the step of faith and stay hopeful that the wedding will be able to happen then. Hopefully it’ll be the first real time our friends and family will be able to go to a gathering and it will be one heck of a great celebration!

Now that we got that out of the way let’s chat the fun stuff! Being that I work in the wedding industry creating a beautiful event is not going to be difficult, however I wanted a wedding that embodied who Adam and I are as a couple. Southern elegance and charm were the main words that I really wanted to stick to. I’ve always envisioned my wedding outside under the stars and market lighting. Those were the places that we mostly looked at. However, it just was not working out. We also wanted to consider that about 2/3 of our guest list will have to fly in and most outdoor venues were no where near an airport. Enter The Estate on Second. I loved it when we toured it, but was hesitant to really fall in love in case we couldn’t afford it. Adam did his haggling and worked with the caterer and they came in right where we needed them to (I totally think it was a God thing). When I first saw The Estate and its location it reminded me very much of Savannah, and then upon reading the about page the architecture is even described as Georgian Colonial which just makes my heart happy.

So yeah! That’s where we are at. Moving forward with hopes that we will be able to proceed as planned. We also included a small note in our save the date and website to our guests explaining why we were proceeding, that we appreciated their understanding, and we’d keep them update. I’ll ask y’all too to keep praying for us that we can proceed as planned and that this virus slows down for the worlds sake and selfishly so I can get married.