Weddingbee Blog

I’m sure you all have been holding your breath, just waiting to hear about our venue. Well, now you can breathe easy - here it is, the place Mr. Guinea Pig and I fell in love with on our venue adventures!

The Chesapeake Bay Beach Club
In particular, the Beach House Ballroom!

Let me start the pictures with the part that sold us on the venue (again, keeping in mind that I took my pictures in February on an overcast day, when things aren’t exactly leafy green and flowering).

(The ceremony lawn we’ll use, with the Chesapeake Bay - and bridge - behind it)

This is where we’ll have our ceremony, and while the arbor to the right is lovely, we will be setting ours up so that Mr. Guinea Pig and I will be standing (with our officiant) at that little concrete patch on the far side by the fence. There’s a short beach just on the other side of the fence, and the water starts about 10 feet from where we’ll be standing. So as I mentioned before, our guests will be facing the water (and the sun). We have plans to put something up there to make it stand out a little more than just the concrete pad!

Another fantastic feature of this is the spot where I’ve taken the ceremony lawn photo from:

(Rocking chairs on the porch!)

There’s a little porch behind the ceremony site with rocking chairs and a wonderful outdoor fireplace (you can see that in the back there). Not that we will need that in May (as I knock on wood for typing that).
These rocking chairs sit in front of the windows for the ballroom:

(Empty Beach House Ballroom, taken from Flickr - see the chairs outside the windows on the left?)

(room set up for a wedding, courtesy of egomedia photography)

The ceilings are wonderfully high, and I love that the room is really open. I’ll admit I don’t love the brown on the walls, but I guess I’m glad it’s a fairly neutral color. The floor is a lovely dark wood and you can arrange the tables any way you want to situate the ’dance floor’ space - we’re going to have it open in the middle of the room for convenient table -> dance floor movement!

(the view across the ceremony lawn back to the ballroom)

The ballroom is behind the main windows you see dead center in the photo, but off to the right behind the fireplace in this picture is the door for the bar area that we’ll use along with the great outdoor porch for our cocktail hour! If it rains, there’s a separate little space (to the far right out of frame in the above photo) that we will use, and the bar area can accommodate all guests for cocktail hour, if need be.

We had two major points of contention with the CBBC (my shortcut for The Chesapeake Bay Beach Club) even though we loved the space. One, is that there are 3 ballrooms and we aren’t too fond of the idea that two other weddings could be going on at the same time as ours. Our worries about this were assuaged by the fact that our building is separate from the building that houses the other two ballrooms, and it is the first one you see coming from the parking lot. So, with a lovely cute sign of our names out front (note to self, put that on to-do list), it will be easy for our guests to see where to go for our wedding. Still, the part of every bride that says “me me me, I’m the only bride that day!” is a little nervous about the potential for other weddings nearby.

The second problem, which was by far the most difficult, are the astronomical prices. Several years ago (2005), this venue was featured on the Today show when it won as the wedding venue for “Today throws a Hometown Wedding”. I think this may have led them to believe they could charge whatever they wanted, because the prices were hyperventilation levels high. Mr. Guinea Pig and I spent a long time deciding if this was worth the cost, and how we would be able to make it work - right before we told them our decision (maybe because we waited so long and they wanted to entice us?), we got an email saying they had lowered the prices! This pretty much sold us because essentially they had halved the fees. Now don’t get me wrong, this place is still super expensive because catering is in-house and the site rental fees aren’t cheap, even at half-price, but we were willing to make it work!

This makes the venue (with food/beverage included) a large majority of our budget. And I do mean majority - I think it’s going to end up being around 70%. But there are benefits: we don’t need to rent anything, all the tables, chairs (Chivari!), dinnerware, linens, etc. are all included, so that’s less stress for me to worry about, we’ve heard that the food is amazing (we go to our tasting next month), and there’s a Day-of-Coordinator included (which, thanks to Weddingbee, I know is a must)!

So there you have it! Our venue, at last! Mr. Guinea Pig and I are very, very excited and we can’t wait to get married here - fingers crossed for excellent weather!

Did you choose one vendor you wanted to splurge on? Was it hard to convince yourself it would be worth it in the end? What was your most important vendor decision?