Wedding Planning: The Venues.

When starting the process of wedding planning, the first major thing I wanted to think about was the venues. We are not religious, so we didn't want a big church wedding and thus the hunt for an alternative venue ensued.

The first idea was to have a barn or country style manor house set in the rolling hills of Yorkshire which was a great idea to start with, however the more places I saw online the more I realised that the venues were nice from the outside but quite dated on the inside. Not only was this not something I enjoyed but it usually means you can't decorate the interior either, due to the age of the buildings. So although it sounded great having somewhere that looked amazing from the outside, we'd be spending most of our time inside... so it didn't really make sense.

The next thing I did was hit up the Google search with 'alternative wedding venues' which came up with a couple of interesting options. I saw one couple had gotten married in a theatre in Sheffield and even in a museum however one that did peak my interest was the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield, it was central, different and quite modern. However the problem I had with this, is the exact opposite...it was so clean on the inside, so white...it almost had no character to it and I didn't want to spend a fortune decorating it.

I was starting to lose hope after hours and hours trawling the internet, when I looked back at a ceremony venue I had looked at before but spent a little more time studying the webpage, I had previously only looked at the barn hire for Wentworth Castle but I also noticed a 'Conservatory'. This sounded different and cool, I have a love for pretty flowers and the glass sounded like a good idea for plenty of sunlight. I then Google image searched my little heart out....it was beautiful. A beautiful newly renovated Victorian Conservatory set in the grounds of a beautiful stately home, with beautiful flowers and glass details on the inside, its in nice countryside and within Yorkshire...so I searched for the dreaded cost ...

Except it was the exact opposite of what I expected, it was cheap and you got to use the entire grounds for your photographs...SIGN ME UP. So I piled together some links and showed hubs to be fully expecting him to hate it...but he liked it. Hours of trawling through blogs, threads, websites, magazines and we'd finally found something very unique, pretty, cheap, local-ish and we both liked. winner.

Then came the task of doing it all again for reception options. As much as I liked our venue, after seeing the cost of hiring a marque, then with food costs on top, it was spiralling out of control with the budget and I wanted a cheaper separate venue.

As you can probably guess, my Google search went hours and hours deep and was unsuccessful for quite a while. I ended up crawling through Google images instead and came across this amazing building with a chimney and a married couple outside. I put my detective skills on (saved the image and scrolled in on the building text..ha!) and found the venue called The Chimney House. As soon as I saw the interior I was sold...it just happened to hold the right amount of guests, was cheap, very local oh and did I mention super cool?



So the next step was to contact both of the venues and see what dates they had available...guess what? They had exactly the dates we wanted. So we immediately booked appointments to go see the venues, because hey, I'm one of those crazy planner people that needs it all done and sorted ASAP so I can stop freaking out k?! k.

As I've been rambling for a lot longer than I thought I would.. I might split this post into 2 and talk about all the questions we asked when visiting the venues, as we were stumped really, because hey, I've never planned a wedding before!?

I hope this was interesting to some of you and gave you a little insight to behind the scene goings on. I literally had never even thought about a wedding until it actually started happening, so I had no real clue what I wanted, so this is all happening not that long before I'm telling you about it!

Watch out for part 2! or for those interested in my first wedding post, please click here :)