Wedding Blog

So the thing I’ve neglected to mention so far is how Mr. Hummingbird and I picked a date and decided the location of our upcoming nuptials. Like all great decisions, it was made over steaks and a few bottles of wine at Mr. Hummingbird’s dad’s house.

Originally, the plan was to save up some money and do it downtown at either The Gladstone Hotel or The Academy of Spherical Arts, because both places were our style (classic but fun and funky) and gave us reasonable quotes, putting them at the manageble end of the money scale, especially considering that a number of the places I spoke with seemed to have a whole bunch of hidden extras or were just plain expensive.

So we began talking. How can we afford to pay for this? How much money would we need to put away? How much money would we have to spend once we paid for the venue? I mean don’t get me wrong, the places were beautiful and if money were no object, I’d slap down a cheque for either in ten seconds flat (hell, if money were no object, I’d have gotten married at the glassed in rooftop lounge at The Park Hyatt), but they were both charging a few thousand dollars for space and space alone. No linens, no food, no decorations, nothing but a room.

We had been talking about moving to a better apartment, about going to France on vacation and eventually, we wanted to move out of the city and buy a house. Where would going into ten grand of debt leave us on all those things and what would that mean for the next few years of our lives? We both work in creative fields (I’m in publishing and he’s in video game design) so, while the work is fulfilling, we’re not exactly raking in the dough.

A mention was made of indefinite postponement. I felt sick. Why couldn’t we pull this together? We were both adults, neither of us was irresponsible with our bank accounts. I mean I’d managed to pay for my entire college education myself by working (30 hours a week on top of an eight course load - not something I would recommend but doable) and now here I was, so broke that I couldn’t even afford to get married. How were dollar and dime decisions so prohibitive?

Happily, this was when Mr. Hummingbird’s dad came to the rescue and told us through work, he had access to a free formal 70 person tent. We had discussed the idea of doing a tented wedding back in the early days of planning, but when I had looked up the cost of a tent, it seemed comparable to what we would have paid downtown, so it was vetoed and dropped. However, with a free tent and $3,000 off our budget, things were actually seeming manageable again. So, with access to the tent, a couple of acres to put it on, a huge deck dancefloor and a beautiful flowered arbour to get married under, it seemed as though we’d found our place. Mr. Hummingbird’s dad was even sweet enough to offer to pay for limos so that our retail-working downtown friends, for whom the trip out would be expensive to make, could join us for free. I know it’ll make me sound like a dork, but I was so happy, I almost felt like crying.

As for the date, with no competition for the space, it was a no brainer - June 28, which is not only the birthday of my teenage crush, John Cusack (I used to watch Say Anything . . . all the time when I was 15, hoping that I would some day come across a real life Lloyd Dobler), but the anniversary of our very first date. My only concern now is the weather. Cross your fingers it doesn’t rain for us!

Anyway, with our venue and date saga behind us, I turn to you ladies for your stories. Did you have financial struggles and worries when you first started planning? Who or what helped you get over them? What was the journey you took to arrive at your perfect place and date?