Venue Hunting – And the Winner is…

Having looked round some venues over Easter, and a couple more in the summer, we finally sat down and decided on our favourite.  It was in fact the first place we saw and something about it never quite left us when we were looking at the other places.  It seemed to have everything:

• Tucked away in a quiet location in the hills
• Beautiful gardens
• The buildings have real character
• It’s a family-run business, and they don’t do many weddings so everything is individualised
• They have a few rooms which friends and family could stay in on the night
• It’s not too far from our families’ homes, meaning they could go back the same night if they chose

Venue Hunting – The Runners-Up

Once we had discussed the pros and cons of various prospective venues, A Man and I decided to look round a few places around Easter-time last year (right around when I should have been revising for finals…).  Some of the organisers seemed surprised that we were viewing venues quite so early, but we had our reasons.  As I have previously mentioned, I am super-organised about things like this and don’t feel comfortable until things are Sorted (with a definite capital S!).  There were also few occasions when we could both look around places while we were both at university, and we wanted a specific date, on a Saturday, in the middle of summer. We didn’t tell our parents that we were going to look at venues, simply because we didn’t want to have an influx of opinions!  We decided that it would be far easier to look around, book the place and then let our parents know when and where we would be getting married.  We only looked around 5 places, having already ruled out various others for different reasons, and the Longhouse was an immediate ‘No’.  Before I write a post gushing about the venue we ended up choosing, here are our 3 runners-up.

Venue Hunting – The Rejects

Venue hunting for us started much earlier than it would for most couples.  This was primarily down to the fact that we have had such a long engagement, but also because I like to plan.  I’m the girl who organises holidays with our group of friends, the one who arranges for everyone to meet up and the one who likes to know where I’m supposed to be, what I’m supposed to do and when.

We knew we wanted to marry near to where we both grew up.  To us it was a no-brainer, as most of our family either still live there or would be able to stay with someone if they were visiting to attend the wedding.  I started to scour the internet around 2 years before our planned date, and ordered countless brochures to flick through when A Man came to stay.  We had 2 main criteria:

1. The venue had to accommodate at least our projected numbers.
2. We preferred to find somewhere which was licensed to hold the ceremony.