How to plan your wedding: Part 1 {Picking your venue}

So you've gotten engaged to your best friend and are looking to begin the process of planning out the wedding you have been dreaming of your whole life! Planning can easily get out of control and stressful if you don't have the proper tools, or people helping you along the way. This is the first in a series of blogs that will hopefully try to help ease that stress for you a little bit, if not just give you a few great ideas to make your wedding awesome! After all, who doesn't want their wedding to be amazing?

The first thing we are going to discuss in this series is picking your venue. There are a million different ways you could go with this, and generally our brides seem to already have the basic idea of what they want, but there are some tips and tricks to making the process a little easier!

First thing you should think about is how many guests you are going to have at your wedding? If you are going to have 200 guests at your wedding, you may not want to select your local tiny chapel unless you all want to get really friendly! You may also want to keep in mind the size of your bridal party and the area where they will be standing to make sure that they will all comfortably fit! Are you going to be having your ceremony and reception in the same place or are you doing two different locations. Do you want to be getting ready at the venue or somewhere else, and do they have a big enough space for all of you to get ready on location?

Once you figure out some of these things you can narrow down your choices a little bit! Then you may begin asking even deeper questions to find out exactly what you need.

• Will your theme/colors go well with the venue? Will it be within budget to fill it with decor and flowers?
• What time of year are you planning your wedding for? A beach wedding in Florida would probably be better planned for April or May rather than August to keep your guests and yourself from sweating to death all day. 
• Do they have in house catering or are you willing to bring a caterer in?
• Do they have a liquor license and/or are you allowed to bring your own liquor to save on budget?
• Do they have a big enough space for dancing and are you planning on having a band that takes up a lot of room?
• If you ceremony is outdoors, what is their "backup/rainout" ceremony plan and are you happy with the size and look of it? All too many times a bride puts everything she has into the beach wedding and HATES the backup plan when it rains out. Unfortunately we haven't figured out how to control the weather yet! 
• What kind of restrictions does the venue have? (Open flames, off limit spaces, noise, etc..) 
• Do they provide in house wedding day planner, and do you want that? 
• Does the venue work specifically with certain vendors and are you allowed to have options?
• What are the surrounding areas like for pictures, and is there a spot on the grounds that they prefer you use?
• What is the parking like? Is there a fee that your guests will have to pay? Do they offer valet?
• Does the venue have an adequate sound system or will you need to rent or hire a sound professional?
• Do they have enough chairs for amount of guests you will be having or does that need to be rented as well?
• Wheel chair accessible? 
• What are the venues cancellation policies?