Vendor Love

This ones a long ones folks! Get ready...

These days weddings on average take over a year to plan. Therefore you have already booked most of your vendors about a year out and have had meetings, tastings, listened to your potential dj or band, and maybe have had an engagement shoot with your photographer. For our wedding, vendors have been mostly shocked with our speedy engagement. They love the story..."Well we were going to do it next year but we figured...why wait!" But then they kind of laugh when I say that we'll be getting married in a few months/couple months/few weeks, depending on which vendor it is. "Oh! That's so nice...Oh...that soon...yeah, we're not available." It wasn't always that the time from proposal to wedding would be so long. We are in fact just getting married under a year but didn't start the planning until 9 months into it.

Onto the vendors...We have been so lucky with our vendors! And I really love them all! Some we were able to nail down as soon as we made the decision to move the date up and some we just booked in the last couple of days.

First one: Site. We thought outdoors, maybe barn maybe garden so I started calling around. I happened upon the Bellamy-Ferriday House & Garden in Bethlehem, CT. Now I grew up one town over and never even knew of this magical place! I called them to see if they do weddings, they do! I then asked if they had any availability for September this year, they do! Done! Without ever even seeing the place it was booked. And we couldn't be happier. Keep checking back for post-wedding for pictures of it! (We have since seen it...not to worry!)

Second Vendor: Rentals. Having a wedding at a Connecticut Landmark garden does mean that you must provide all of your own rentals. Not a problem when that's what your brother does! Check!

Third Vendor: Caterer....hmmmm. This is where it started getting a little bit trickier. It was one of the first things that we started looking for and one of the last booked. With the style of the wedding being a fun party, not your most traditional or conventional, we had a specific idea for the food. Something fun and different. Comfort food done in a special way. The items on the menu would be ones that wouldn't be new and difficult for a vendor but as weddings are not always done like this it was hard to convey the message. I would call a caterer and if they were even available (which many were not) then I would explain what we wanted to see on the menu. They would then prepare the proposal and get it back to me. Seemed easy enough until the proposals didn't include the key items we had asked for. It appeared that they wanted to "spice it up" thinking that maybe I wasn't sure if what I had requested was really what I meant. No, really....let's see some mac & cheese...but fancy. I didn't ever want to seem like a crazy bride...just really wanted yummy foods! As luck would have it one of the original caterers I had contacted but never got to touch base with got in touch with me. We discussed the menu ideas and she totally got it and tah-dah!, like magic, we have a menu that is hearty and whimsical! Jordan Caterers to the rescue!

Vendor Four: DJ...easy as pie. We met with Bobby at a local restaurant and knew right away that we liked him. Done!

Vendor Five: I love love an amazing wedding picture. I love when there is just something a little different than your regular wedding portrait. From combing through all of these amazing blogs the last few months I have found so many unbelievable photographers out there! I have also found that most of them are way out of our budget! Unsure of what to do....we did nothing. We kept researching, kept discussing. We were close a few times but they fell through. Then like the light breaking through the clouds came my mom and her amazing connection. A friend is starting a wedding photography biz as he just got married himself. And they're trying to build a portfolio and both he and his wife have great experience with photography. And we'll be the first clients! As someone who is also starting a business I think it's only right to allow others the opportunity to get started!

So there you have it readers! With a mix of risk and perseverance we have ourselves a bunch of awesome vendors! Now these are the biggie vendors for the wedding, I will of course be writing about all of the other amazing people that we've been working with who have provided such items as dress, rings, flowers, invites...all amazingly talented it's crazy!

I'm off to another wedding this weekend so some of the next few posts will include even more real wedding love!!