Weddingbee Blog

I already posted about the location that wasn’t (sigh). Today, I want to talk about the venue and style that wasn’t (weren’t)! I realize these posts may sound a bit Negative Nancy, but bear with me; we’re narrowing things down and will eventually get to “what was”! Well, is. You get the idea.

Once we agreed to have the wedding in Seattle (as opposed to Santa Clara, our college, or San Diego, his home city), I decided to channel my inner Pacific Northwest vibe and develop a very specific vision for the wedding.

{Photo by Mark Brooke / Coordination by Joy de Vivre Wedding Coordination / via Style Me Pretty}

{Photos by Sean Flanigan, both from this post}

{Photo and styling by Martha Stewart}

{Photo and styling by Martha Stewart Weddings}

Serious swoonage. Barn. Old, peeling wood. Moss. Lots of moss. More moss. Milk glass. Mushrooms. (OK, maybe not mushrooms.) Wood slabs. Shrubbery. Basically, I wanted to take the Olympic Peninsula and stick it in a barn-like venue for the reception (without the rain).

Yes. Love love love.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Sigh again. The place we were crushing on (Sodo Park, actually the second and third images above) was a bit out of our price range, and it is in a super-urban area of Seattle. I suppose it wouldn’t have been the end of the world, but we really wanted a location that was on or near the water, or that could at least show off the city of Seattle (and not require our guests to schlep around by all the warehouses).

So we searched. And searched. And searched some more. But honestly? We could not find any other barn-ish venue. Not in the Seattle area, anyway, and because we have quite a few out-of-town guests coming, we didn’t want anything too far away from the city center (or airport).

Thus died my dream of a rustic barn wedding. In the end, though, it was all for the best because the venue we ended up with is amazing. AH-mazing. Trust me!

Did you go into your planning with a specific vision, only to have it change completely/dramatically/with-tears-involved due to location, budgetary issues, etc.? Did you consciously change your wedding vision, or did you find that it subtly evolved through the planning process?