Weddingbee Blog

We were thinking small from the beginning, under 200 for sure. When we found a venue that only held 150, it was perfect because it forced us to cut back and gave us a good excuse.
Becky

Perfect timing. Our guest list has almost made me want to elope instead. Our place holds “max” 200 people. And they don’t mess around. That is with out dancing and it is a really tight fit. Our invites were sent with a total of 230. What were we thinking? So far only 4 no’s. It is a bad feeling to almost not want people to be at your wedding. I had to get past it and move on. Now we are changing things up to a cocktail style wedding and crossing our fingers for nice weather in Oct and we are in Oregon, so its goign to be a close call. Good luck, and the place looks wonderful!

I love your venue, and I can’t wait to see pix of the wedding! I like the mountain setting that you are having, as well as the rustic vibe of Miss Cherry Pie’s! My kinda thing . . .

We wanted a smalllll wedding (or at least my hubby did!). We told the venue (a ranch that had a couple of different sites available for the reception) about 30 people at first, and then upped it almost immediately to 50″ish”. They said they had a great room at the inn that would be perfect. Later I told them I was now planning to invite about 80 and count on about 65-70 (do we sound waffly? ;-)). They said, oooohhh, that’s a lot, but . . . we still can make it work. Five days before the wedding (ACK!), they said, this isn’t going to work! “We can fit in 65, but you want dancing, too?!” (Told them that before; guess they forgot.) Soooo, at the last minute, they suggested moving us to the “party barn” (for more $$$). It was our decision to make, but what were we going to do when they basically were saying “it ain’t gonna work”? We were worried that the decor was not as neat and the space was toooo big for us. The decor turned out fine anyway, and we added a table (which didn’t make the florist too happy, although we figured out a way to make it work with the existing arrangements) to make things a bit more spread out. It was all fine. But kinda scary for awhile there! I agree you should count your blessings, though!

We invited 189 adults, 5 children. Our final count has been wavering but I think it will stand at 144 adults, 8 children. Probably 80% or more invited were from out of town. Almost an 80% exceptance rate. I think the normal they say is between 70 & 80%. The best part is we have 75 coming to the rehearsal dinner!

Our original guest list was approximately 200 people…at two weeks after the invitations had gone out we’d somehow made our way all the way up to 400 people invited…..thankfully I made all the invitations myself so I just spent many more evenings mass producing. That being said, our venue technically seats 250….75% of our guests are out-of-town and so far we are at a 98% acceptance rate with far more yes’s pouring in every day than no’s. I’m just grateful that no one will be standing at the door of the reception counting people coming in, also that we are not serving a plated sit down dinner…..and that we will have plenty of couches and easy chairs for people to sit in because….at the rate we are going there won’t be seating at the tables for everyone. Guest list is something I’ve decided not to stress about, if people want to come celebrate our marriage with us, then I want them to feel welcome. The last thing we wanted for our special day was feeling bad or causing hurt feelings because someone wasn’t invited. I only wish our parents would have “remembered” all the people they wanted invited a little bit sooner.

thank you for blogging about this!!
i just had the same breakdown on saturday… our guest list went from 275 to 360. our reception is in my parents’ back yard. the current tent only holds 256, so my dad is working with the tent guys to make something custom to hold up to 328. i am now scrambling to make 9 more centerpieces than originally planned. mom, dad, and fiance are helping, so i stopped crying.

repeat: it is a blessing!

We had to invite a lot of out of towners since we are getting married where we live now and not where either of us grew up. We invited our closest friends and family which includes people from asia, europe and the opposite coast. With all of the plane fare price hikes and restrictions making the news right after we sent out our invitations we ended up with 50% of our invitees responding yes. If we segment the list by friends who live in the city where we are getting married the response rate is 100%. We are very excited about having a more intimate wedding, though we will miss those who cannot attend.