Weddingbee Blog

It’s time for some recaps! It took longer than expected to get all the photos gathered up. We hired a photographer, but had few talented friends with fancy cameras there as well, and I couldn’t go on without the whole lot at my fingertips. After sorting through the 3,500+ photos and having a new found love for Mobile Me, I’m ready for some sharing!

Mr. Sunbeam and I went home a week before our wedding day and the week became a whirlwind of activity, sprinkled with a few hiccups—one of which was the weather forecast, which toyed with me by having conflicting reports of rain, sun, and downpour on each of the three weather apps I downloaded!

We spent the first day-and-a-half settling in, then decided to visit our reception site, a converted barn, one evening. The first thing we did was throw out our lighting ideas. The barn had been in the process of being remodeled during our previous visits, so this was the first time we were seeing the final product. With all the light and fan fixtures up, there just wasn’t much room or many plugs left for any romantic strings of light, or big clusters of paper lanterns. It made me sigh to forgo our lighting ideas, but the string lights that were already lining the roof of the barn would still be a beautiful backdrop for our photos. Besides, there was a bigger snafu to deal with.

While I told the owner months ago we wouldn’t be using his chairs or round tables he owned, he always responded, “Whatever you want; you just tell me what you want.” we found the owner wasn’t going to be as helpful as he had been leading on. If we didn’t want to use his tables and chairs (see photo above), he decided we had to remove them from the space ourselves—down two flights of stairs—or pay up, big time. This came out of nowhere. It felt as though the owner was suddenly thinking he should have asked us for more money, and this was a way to get it. With no time to spend arguing, we had no choice but come back the next day clear out the barn. Luckily, two of the men who worked on the farm helped us out with a forklift (after an hour or two of hauling chairs) so we only lost an afternoon and not the entire day. It was a setback for sure, but, with days to go, we had to do what we had to do!

As though I wasn’t having enough heart palpitations already, we also discovered the barn had been… well… ’seasonally’ decorated, with two giant rocking horses to boot. And the decorations didn’t stop inside; they spilled onto the entire front lawn. I can’t say I ever anticipated having scarecrows at our wedding. I was told they were in the process of cleaning up from a party the owner had the weekend before, so I thought, ‘OK, maybe later in the week the decorations will be gone. A day later, not one decoration had moved, so I quickly emailed the owner and just flat out asked for it all to be put away, down to the haystacks. After all, we just lost half a day clearing his barn out. On our next visit, most of the decor was gone, but some friends did scale a wall to take down a plastic horse that was clearly not budging.

The space was ready for our padded garden chairs and long banquet tables to arrive and our floor plan had been drawn up for weeks. The candles and mason jars that would decorate the tables were waiting in their boxes. We had set our lighting ideas aside and accepted the space wouldn’t be as decorated as we had hoped. The barn was on its way to becoming something presentable, but would it become a beautiful reception space? I started to have serious doubts.

One good thing did happen—Sunbeam Kitty was the best traveler ever! She didn’t freak out at the airport when we had to remove her from her carrier, even with me panicking she would, and she didn’t make a single peep on the plane! When we got her to my family’s house, she was so curious about her surroundings, and by the time we left she had made friends with my mom’s cat. Phew! One thing was going better than expected!

Up Next: Taking a break for some Bachelor/ette fun!