The Invitations

We have finally started working on our invitations! 173 days to go and real, tangible wedding things are starting to happen!

We bought our invitations IONS ago. We found them randomly chilling in a clearance aisle at a Michael's craft store. This aisle had dozens of boxes of random invitations and other miscellaneous items that were so thrown about it looked like a tornado had blown it's way through.  We spent at least half an hour digging through the piles, hoping to find enough boxes that matched in a design that we liked for our invitations. Luckily for us, we were able to scrape enough of them together! We walked out of the store with all of our invitations for $45. The only thing left would be to print our information on them.

Special shout out to my office, the Sexual Assault Resource Agency (SARA). While cleaning out basement storage, I found an old printer that had been sitting there for who knows how long (and not even sure if it actually worked). I asked if I could borrow the printer for our invitations, and they were generous enough to allow me to do so. With some tinkering and searching for the right number ink cartridge, Emily and I were able to get the printer to work! We settled on final layout and wording for our invitations and we are all ready to get them printed.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Y'all. Life has been so crazy. Emily and I keep having these moments where we have a chance to pause and we reflect on the fact that we have no idea where the time is going. It keeps passing and we don't even realize whats happening. I realize that I've been relatively absent on my blogging journey...the good news is that you haven't missed much. Until very recently, we haven't been doing much wedding work.

Today I thought that I'd share a bit of an update regarding our venue. It has been an interesting journey, to say the least!

Shortly after we were engaged in August 2016, we took a trip back to the Midwest for a wedding. While were there, we took the opportunity to browse around the area for some potential wedding venues. We visited 2 that were near my hometown in Illinois. After totally hating the first, we fell absolutely in love with the second. Emily even had a made-for-TLC moment and cried with overflowing emotion on the spot where our ceremony would be taking place. It was SO affordable, quaint, and fit perfectly with the motif that was guiding our wedding vision. We left there by putting a hold for our date with a promise from the venue owner/manager that we would focus on a contract at a later time (since we were more than 2 years away from our actual wedding date). We left there feeling great about our venue. It was a perfect fit. There were only a couple things about it that we weren't crazy about, but they certainly weren't deal breakers.

Fast forward several months, and we reached out to the owner/manager asking about a contract so we could sign and start making payments. We received a new version of the contract that we had browsed during our initial visit, but the price had gone up and what was included was a bit different than what was initially offered.  We had another visit to the Midwest planned for a few months later, so we scheduled a time to meet at the venue to officially sign everything. At the time, my mom was the only one of our parents to have seen the venue, so we also invited the rest of our parents to join us for a tour and dinner.  We all met up, and everyone fell in love with it as much as we had. It was still almost-as-perfect as it had been the first time we saw it.

The owner was out of town, but another manager planned to help us out in signing the contract. We explained the confusing difference in the two contracts that we had seen after she handed us a third version that was even more different and expensive. She said she would check with the owner when she returned. We signed a TBD contract and left without paying anything.

After much deliberation and some conversation about other options, Emily and I decided that the original venue no longer matched what we wanted or needed. It was going to be significantly out of our price range if we were not offered the original price we fell in love with, and those things we weren't crazy about were slowly becoming deal breakers. We decided that since we still had not officially booked the venue, that we would back out.

We then moved to a camp in my hometown. It was much more affordable and had a lot of bare bones with the freedom to create it was we wanted. It wasn't as perfect as the original venue, but it would do. Plus, because it was a summer camp, it had cabins that we planned to rent out for guests who wanted to stay on property with us. It was available for our date and the price was right, so we put our names down for the weekend.

We sent our save the dates out with our wedding website all set up with information about Oregon, IL. Two days later, a series of unfortunate events that were completely out of our control, that venue was no longer going to work.

Panic mode ensues.

We were now less than a year out from our wedding date and suddenly had no venue. We started calling any and every venue between Milwaukee and Oregon and nothing was available in our budget for October 13. October is apparently the new June when it comes to wedding dates, so the prime time Saturday we had been planning on for 2+ years was also booked well in advance for other couples.

Thankfully we were able to find a beautiful venue with the right price that was available the next morning. It seemed to have all worked out the way it was supposed to, because a morning/brunch wedding was so much more us than a traditional evening ceremony anyway.

SO. If you received a Save-The-Date from us, this is your official pre-invitation alert that our date is now Sunday, October 14, 2018.  Invitations will be making their way to you shortly.

Our new (and official all paid for) wedding venue is the South Shore Pavilion in Milwaukee, WI. It's a beautiful pavilion right on lake with huge windows and the freedom to essentially do whatever we want. And, special thanks to Emily's mom and her neighbors, we have some great photos they took while another couple was setting up for their wedding. We can't wait to turn it into the space of our dreams and share a special morning with our loved ones.

The Main Entrance to the Pavilion

The "cocktail hour"/kitchen area

The main hall