How To Plan A Wedding In Sacramento: A Series
The Temple Room and Rings by Rachelle Stogner, Rachelle Photography
Getting married can be a full-time job. More precisely, planning a wedding can be a full-time job. When you already have one full-time job, wedding planning can leave little time for life’s more fulfilling pursuits, like blogging. Our wedding having come and gone, however, I can now return to blogging - Ta-Da! - since I know how you’ve been missing me. Right? No? Oh well.
Since I relied heavily on the web for wedding research, but found little in the way of Sacramento-based wedding advice. Google can help. Word-of-mouth is more reliable. One unexpected but very helpful resource proved to be Flickr. Search tags for “Sacramento Wedding” or any particular venue or vendor and see what you find. I used it to shop for photographers (though I found mine elsewhere). It also can provide clues about hair, make-up, cakes, etc. When in doubt, send flickr mail and see if the bride, groom, guest, or photographer can provide further information.
I figured maybe some of what we learned in the process - tips, money-saving ideas, and vendor recommendations - might be useful to some readers and future wedding planners out there.
So over the next week or so, I’ll be posting about choosing: the venue, the dress, the photographer, live musicians, the DJ, the florist, the cake bakery, and a few other odds-and-ends. I hope that upcoming Sacramento brides find something useful here and encourage others to leave comments with their own experiences and advice.
Oh - and a quick preface for what’s to come: Weddings can suck. More precisely, weddings are usually great, but planning them can suck - at least that’s what conventional wisdom and poorly written sitcoms and movies tell us. But do you know what led to weddings being potentially un-fun money pits?
Weak brides.
Follow me after the jump for a better explanation and the first part of this series: The Venue.
Picking a venue is hard. It’s a big decision and, in many cases, represents the largest part of your budget (especially if the venue is partnered with the caterer). The venue can set the tone for the day, determine your decor, your colors, what kind of photos you’ll end up having by which to remember the day, and how much time you’ll spend worrying about wedding day logistics.
At the start of all this, I had dreams of renting out a favorite restaurant (top among my choices, Spataro for the decor, and the sublime Mulvaneys B&L for the food, oh the glorious food, and the ambiance). But size constraints and costs soon dissuaded me from that path. For Spataro, I knew I’d end up spending way too much on adequate, but not memorable food. And the real problem: wine and cocktails. There’d be no break on those, kids, and $20 corkage made bring even Two Buck Chuck a non-option.
Mulvaney’s - with whom I spoke several times - presented me with a to-die-for menu and some really workable alcohol options. But, alas, their restaurant just couldn’t accommodate the number of guests I’d hoped to invite - and I didn’t want to exclude people based on table space (though obviously, cost and space are almost always the ultimate determining factor in your final guest list). I toyed with finding some alternative space, since Mulvaney’s grew from caterers Culinary Specialists and could provide on-site catering in the area.
I checked out Scribner Bend Vineyards - a lovely levee side location that was so far down a windy road I worried about losing guests, but their flat rate of approximately $3000 just to USE the space (as in, that got you nothing but a space, not booze, not food, etc - oh and it is ALL outdoors, so good luck with weather, ’cause they don’t have a tent and those are costly too) seemed to high for me (more on room rental rates in a moment).
Where I SHOULD have looked more closely, is the lovely Clunie Community Center in McKinley Park (East Sac). Yes, it’s just a park community room, BUT, it’s in very nice shape and I think what you’d save on room fees at more posh venues you can use to get better food and design a really lovely environment in which to hold your reception. Check it out.
I came close to booking our ceremony and reception at Old Sac’s Firehouse Restaurant - certainly a beautiful, historic, and posh site for your proper Sacramento wedding. I employed, however, an oft recommended strategy of comparing their party rates with their wedding rates (with the help of a cover story and some friends). There was a lot of potentially incorrect information given to me at various points, contradicted by various staff, and mostly, a whole lot of dodging. Weddings come with a $1500 room fee. That fee - in fact, no fee - was mentioned when the event about which I enquired was NOT a wedding. Okay, so, what would I have received for the price? Some extra table linens, staff (would they have understaffed my other event?), a gift table and a cake table. Okay, so what if I don’t want that stuff? I like to negotiate things. I have no problem paying, necessarily, if I’m getting something in return.
Nope, you pay, you get, or you don’t get, but you still pay.
After numerous requests for a price sheet or sample contract were either rebuffed or straight out avoided: at one point I went to the restaurant to meet with the special events head, only to be told - after having made and CONFIRMED my appointment that he’d been “given the day off,” I asked the man who said he was the special events head’s boss if he could just give me some printed information because I was really needing to make a decision. He said sure and came back with their “wedding information package.” It didn’t say that on the cover. He said it was. I asked if he was sure the information I wanted was there and he assured me it was. It wasn’t. I sent an email expressing my displeasure and heard nothing back. Bye-bye Firehouse.
So here’s where we come back to weak brides being responsible for all brides having it tough.
I had ZERO bargaining power talking to the Firehouse because if I balked at the the $1500 marriage penalty, there was still some other bride around the corner who’d pay it without asking, without knowing she was getting charged what other, non-wedding parties weren’t, and without a second thought.
Vendors in nearly every aspect of the wedding industry profit highly from brides’ lack of deliberation. Think used car salesmen are bad? Do they scrape VIN numbers off vehicles? Dress vendors will remove style numbers from dresses. And all the venues charge fees. Because they can. Because we let them. I’m ashamed to say I fell prey to these tactics several times, but I swear I put up the best fight I could as often as I could.
Anyway - in the end, we opted for a traditional Wedding Venue: Capitol Plaza Ballrooms. They have their own in-house caterer (which you must use unless you have some specific form of ethnic cuisine they can’t provide, such as Indian or Chinese). We never got to sample the food beforehand (we could’ve done so after we signed the contract, before we finalized the menu, but the timing just never worked out). I visited the site. It seemed pretty good. They have some very ballroom-y looking ballrooms, as well as slightly worn, yet still tough-to-find-elsewhere Deco gem in the basement.
The staff was always accessible and were beyond patient at my repeated viewings of the venue (btw: since my groom was out of the country for a lot of the pre-planning, I was extra stressed at making such a big decision with his input based largely on photos - so I had a LOT of questions for the site and visited MANY times before we signed anything).
[It wasn't until after I signed the contract and gave them a chunk of change that I clued into the Moe Mohanna controversy. I'm still not sure I feel about that situation. The halls are lovely, but judging by the fair bit of love they could stand to be shown to make them truly glorious again, I tend to believe the city when it comes to the arguments over who is screwing K Street worse. Oh, and I love eminent domain. BUT, that said, the staff at the Ballrooms were still great and I certainly didn't bring up any concerns since it was my fault for being ignorant going into the deal.]
My boss, who also married there, vouched for the quality of the food and, as things turned out, many guests said they loved the meal. I liked the Chicken Florentine a lot - but the bride and groom don’t really get a leisurely meal on their day.
The site does charge a room rental fee which covers 5 hours of facility time. They also charge another fee if you have your ceremony there. We paid for both. Which was still less than the $1500 Firehouse Bridal Penalty. There could have been a bit more coordination on the day-of (personal attention seemed a bit down on the day of, though it was far from absent). I will say, though, that I think the say running smoothly owes as much to the groom, me, and our families as it does the staff. So be prepared, kids. Only you can prevent forest fires and botched wedding days.
I worried a lot after we had booked the venue and before the wedding day that I had made a mistake in moving away from a less common, more personal venue, and into a Wedding Venue (TM) situation. In the end, however, it truly is the people that make the day. We had plenty of our own touches and the backdrop was just fine.
Having so many people you love in one room certainly adds a glow that’s priceless and can’t be created artificially.
For more:
Day One: The Series
Day Two: The Dress
Day Three: The Photographer
Day Four: The Music
Day Five: The Cake
Day Six: The Flowers
Day Seven: The Legal Stuff
Day Eight: Random Other Stuff
Related posts:
Yes, you were missed. Any thought of writing a wedding planning book?
Whew! I am *so* glad I got married in a cheesy overseas civil ceremony.
Looking forward to reading the next installment.
And CONGRATULATIONS! on your new nuptials. :-)
Gary - know any publishers? ;) For the right advance, I’d write one tonight.
Ursula - believe me, before things got going, planning-wise, the only vision I had in my head was of the short-dress, casual, everyone drink! variety.