Wednesday, May 10, 2017

The Venue

Edward didn’t ask for much when it came to our wedding, but one of his requests was that our wedding ceremony take place in a church. Although we both have Christian upbringings, I was less attached to the idea of having our ceremony in a church. I mean, pastors travel and Jesus is everywhere. Jesus put Edward and I together and I knew He (Jesus) would be sure to make it to our wedding ceremony regardless of where it took place.

One of the things I cared about most in our wedding was dancing; with Edward, with my friends, by myself. I didn’t care who I was dancing with, I just knew that I wanted to be on the floor dancing until the very last song. And if that was the case, we would definitely have to have our wedding reception at another location, because I wasn’t trying to get struck down for disrespecting the Lord’s house by gettin’ down in a church.

I definitely thought it was more logical to have our wedding ceremony and reception at the same location. I tried explaining to Edward that it would be an inconvenience and also time consuming for the wedding party and guests to have to travel from one location to another. One of the things I’d heard a lot from other couples was how fast their wedding day went and I wanted to enjoy every second of our day without it feeling rushed. I didn’t want to waste the day dealing with traveling, traffic and being stressed out by time constraints. I wanted things to be simple and easy for everyone. 

We were already on a budget and splitting up the ceremony and reception locations only added to that budget. We would have to book a hotel and rent some sort of car service when we could just eliminate those costs by having the ceremony and reception take place at one location.

Image by Danfredo Photos & Film
I showed Edward a few online photos of Flushing Town Hall, which is a venue that I’d had my eye on for years. I thought Flushing Town Hall was great for us because it was affordable, unique and very scenic. Flushing Town Hall had a few spaces that we could use for different blocks of our day which I thought was perfect!

My husband is extremely stubborn so he was insistent on us having our ceremony in a church. Since we began planning our wedding less than a year to our wedding date, we didn’t really have time to waste going back and forth with each other when we didn’t yet have a venue booked to be going back and forth about. We put the location of our wedding ceremony on the back burner for the moment and made a few appointments to check out some venues.

As I’ve said before, I just don’t have the energy that I used to have, so I wasn’t interested in traveling back and forth visiting venue after venue. So like an episode of House Hunters, we made appointments to visit three venues, all in Queens and we were GOING TO agree on one of them.
Since I’d already had my eye on Flushing Town Hall and it was close to where we live, it only made sense that it be the first place we visit.

The moment we stepped into Flushing Town Hall the heavens opened and angels literally began singing; AND playing their harps. The weather was gorgeous that day, so Edward and I were able to get an accurate vision of what our wedding would look like if the weather held up.

The venue manager, Kevin, took us on a tour of the garden, the gallery and the theater which all could be booked for one reasonable price. We could use the gallery for the cocktail hour and the theater for our reception. We would have the entire building to ourselves verses having to share the space with multiple events also taking place on the same day; which would have been fine with me, but I’m bougie so I preferred the idea of us having the building to ourselves.

Image by Danfredo Photos & Film
Kevin suggested that we have our ceremony in the garden. The second I began mentioning to Kevin that Edward wanted to have the ceremony at his church, Edward interrupted me by stating that it was fine for us to have our ceremony in the Flushing Town Hall garden. Psssh… Sometimes you have to be quiet and let people see things for themselves – which is something I’m going to try and remember in my marriage.

When Edward and I floated out of Flushing Town Hall, we were on a dreamy high. It was perfect for us! When hunting for anything worthwhile, you always want  to keep your options open and not commit so quickly to the first thing that comes your way; so even though we’d already  fallen in love with Flushing Town Hall, we still  gave our following two appointments a chance. Needless to say, we couldn’t get over Flushing Town Hall and Flushing Town Hall won. 

There was a lot of work to be done. Flushing Town Hall would provide us with the tables and chairs so at least we wouldn’t have to rent them, but we would have to take care of all of the other details ourselves- decorations, catering, table settings etc... I’m pretty creative and I had Pinterest on my side, but the thought of putting my entire wedding together on my own was extremely overwhelming.  I certainly had my work cut out for me.

How in the world was I going to pull this off?

Up Next: The Wedding Planner