Happy September!

Ahh the 1st September how happy I am to see you! I know many people will be mourning the loss of the high summer months and dreading the oncoming winter and the inevitable rapid arrival of the holiday season but for me September to December is my favourite time of year. I love Autumn and the changing of the leaves, the wrapping up in cosy hats, scarves and boots, the anticipation of the festivities that lie ahead and all the decorations that go with it. Autumn is definitely my favourite season and that's part of the reason why I chose to get married in it. That and the fact that my fiancé and I got together in Autumn which is a very happy coincidence!

Via Free Extras

This Autumn is going to be a very busy and exciting one for me and my lovely other half. We are off on holiday for two weeks to Mexico at the end of September which has been booked since January and has felt such a long time coming! I am literally counting down the days now until we go and dreaming of beaches and pina coladas and trying to forget that it's probably not the best time to go with it being hurricane season! I know we will have the best time though despite any weather that is thrown at us because it will be just the two of us chilling out for two whole weeks. Bliss! It's also going to be my Birthday while we are there so I'm really looking forward to that.

Via The Best Beaches

When we come back we are going to be moving into our new house that we've bought together, we've been living together for three years but this will be the first place that is actually ours :) I'm also going to be leaving my job and starting my PhD so it really is going to be all change! Amidst all that I'm going to make sure we celebrate our 4th anniversary and the official one year to the wedding mark by doing something special, perhaps dinner at our wedding venue?

Via Barcelo Walton Hall

We've also got a couple of wedding fairs to go to including the National Wedding Show which should be really good. I'm taking my Mom and bridesmaid to that so it will be a nice girlie outing and of course I will report back on all my finds!

So yeah bring on Autumn, so much to look forward to! I am a very lucky girl I know. What are your plans for the season?

Photographer Booked!

Happy Tuesday! Hope you are having a good week so far, I've been baking this morning as I've got family coming round for afternoon tea, will post cake pictures later!

So last week we booked our photographer, our first booking for the wedding! Very exciting. However, finding a photographer was a bit of a minefield, there are so many out there, how to choose?! After trawling through loads of websites and looking at lots of gorgeous photos I decided that the best way to pick one was to ask around for recommendations. So I asked about and had a number of glowing responses and a shortlist! I asked a friend who is an amateur photographer to take a look at the websites and we both agreed that our photographer was the one. He had a gallery on his website of the last 70 weddings he has done and I know from going through them that his work is really good and consistent. He has also snapped a lot of weddings at our venue and that was another thing that I wanted; someone who was familiar with where we are getting married. Here are some pictures he has taken at our venue:

Peter Blanchflower Photography

I'm so pleased with our choice and feel that we are in good hands. Our package was right on budget too and includes an engagement shoot and all day photography.

So that's one thing off the to do list and quite a few more to go! I'm looking into videography at the moment and hadn't quite realised that that was going to cost as much as the photography, are you having a photographer and videographer?

The Venue

The first thing we did when we set a date was start looking for venues. I naively thought that this would be quite a simple task. I was wrong. I didn't feel that my demands of a venue were too diva-ish, I didn't want manicured lawns with a cluster of white peacocks or a fairytale castle with a moat and working drawbridge just somewhere nice with a modern, simply decorated interior that had lots of bedrooms or a hotel nearby. I should also mention that we didn't want a church wedding and so ideally wanted a venue where we could hold the ceremony, the wedding breakfast and evening reception because we are getting married in October in England and so weather will probably be against us. However, even with this requirement there are still a lot of places licensed to hold weddings.

I was so excited to start looking up venues on the internet, check out wedding packages and go through menus. I was even more excited to start visiting places but it soon became clear (somewhere between the 20th and 30th venue) that our dream wedding venue was just that, a dream. Ceremony and reception rooms were either too big or too small, venues too expensive, came with too many conditions (one we would have had to pay for all the rooms in the hotel!) or didn't have enough bedrooms. One of the main issues I had was the decoration, the repeat offender being hideously multi-coloured carpet and equally hideous mismatching wallpaper. I know, this might seem like a trivial issue but when you are probably going to have all your photos taken inside you don't want the floor being centre of attention. A lot of the places would have been fine just to have as a wedding breakfast/reception location but the issue really was that we wanted a nice room to get married in as well.

After months of searching and nearly giving up hope we went to see one final venue that we had previously ruled out for being too expensive. As soon as we stepped inside into the 14th Century reception hall with its stained glass windows and big roaring fire I knew it was the one. My fiancé and I walked round with the wedding co-ordinator with our jaws nearly on the floor! It was just perfect, a beautiful old stately home set in 65 acres of countryside overlooking a lake and that had recently undergone a multi-million pound refurbishment meaning that it was all nicely done up inside with no horrible carpet in site - hurrah! The room that we are getting married in has the added bonus of three huge chandeliers going down the middle, it is just beautiful. It will also be fantastic if we have to have photos inside as there are so many indoor photo opportunities. Best of all... they do a really good value wedding package for out of season weddings! Perfect!

And so... the winner is... (drumroll)... Barcelo Walton Hall! Here are some pictures :) sorry they are a bit small but they are from the venue website and are the only ones they have one there. The room shown is the one that we are getting married in and having the wedding breakfast in.

 
How have you found venue hunting?