Reception Venue - I do love.

As I became engaged in July the next few posts is to clue you in to of what I have done since being engaged till now- I'm not superwoman and have done all this overnight! (however many times in talking to wedding vendors I wish I was and could do this all myself!)

FH and I have decided on our criteria for our venue;

1. fit 150 people for a cocktail reception (we don't want a sit down meal as FH and I love to mingle!)
2. able to bring in our own caterer (as being in a small coastal city people think that because they have a venue they can charge exorbitant price for minimal food so selecting our own caterer was important!)
3. able to BYO drinks. (A family friend has graciously volunteered to provide the wine for the entire wedding. We are ever so grateful for this generous offer so in order to take up the offer we needed to be able to BYO drinks.)

In a small coastal city there were not too many venues that could fit this criteria. But after about 2 months of on and off searching we found our venue;

Flinders Park Lodge (a bed and breakfast) that will!

On our booking we are able to have the whole venue to ourselves allowing us to be there at 10am to get ready and our package provides accommodation for the night for 8 couples! (we are asking some close out of town guests to stay as well as spend our honeymoon night there)

Our only reservation was the price, They had a package for two nights but we negotiated for us to only have the one night to halve our cost.

We also had to have a marquee over the deck due to the possibility of bad weather. The Lodge have negotiated with the local Marquee hire to give us a discount of more than half price for a marquee to go over the deck. We were very excited as to see a vision become a reality. We had gone to the Marquee hire place previously and been given a rough estimate that it would cost $1000 dollars for the marquee to go over the deck. After receiving that news we were devastated but resilient to the fact that sometimes we will need to find the alternate option. So Flinders saying that they had negotiated the price for us and had it considerably marked down, we were thrilled.

We have verbally booked but due to make a payment soon (Mid January)

Since making our booking we have found out that the husband that runs the business with his wife has passed away. He was only in his mid 40s. We have not called to check booking as we would like to give the wife her space over the busy period of Christmas in New Year and follow up with a phone call soon.We hope we can still go ahead with the booking, if not our backup plan is a to have a marquee on a friends vacant block in secluded area of our coastal city.

Coastal City Bride - Charis xx