Ok, so I made a previous thread, just to get an idea on what other people did/spent, and it occurred to me I wasn’t specific enough regarding my situation. In a nutshell:
I got engaged recently, and we’re planning our wedding. We want to have it in Fall of 2011 (giving us a little more than a year) in the Bay Area, California at a banquet hall ideally not a community center. We will have 250 guests, and church, rings, music, and photographer are already going to be paid for.
Fiancee’s family’s receptions have lots of music and dancing into the wee hours of the morning. So the place needs to have the capacity to have 250 plus space for a band AND people to dance. It also needs to let us have alcohol and be open from 5PM-midnight.
We are trying to keep the total budget under $15,000, but we’re already collectively pulling our hair out because finding a place in the Bay Area that has A.) the price B.) the capacity and C.) the availability is proving to be extremely difficult. I am imploring Bay Area Dopers if you know of any place that would be good under these (admittedly narrow) parameters I would love to know. So far we have seen:
San Jose Women’s Club- (not really any parking in the area, small for 250 people)
Diamond Palace- Beautiful, also $6,000 outside our price range
Redwood City City Hall Rotunda- too small.
San Jose City Hall Rotunda- Too expensive, only rents for 4 hours.
You might want to check on a website called Indiebride. There are forums there for people who are trying to avoid the WIC, and I would imagine that the Bay Area has a lot of those people.
Is your $15,000 including dress, rings, etc., or is it just the party?
currently, you’re looking at $60 per person including taxes and service. Some things that you will have to avoid, then: 1. Saturday nights 2. Great views.
This year, you can get REALLY lucky. September 11th is a Saturday. Some people are still avoiding it, but it will become like Pearl Harbor Day eventually - just another day that we say had a tragedy and move on. I bet that you can get that great place that’s over budget, a DJ/Band AND a cake for 15K.
I’m getting married this fall on a Friday evening (not in the Bay Area) and had no idea Fridays and Sundays are significantly cheaper. Our cost per person is almost $30 less per person than if we’d had the wedding on a Saturday.
You can get a gorgeous, 3 tiered cake with a topper for $700-$900 dollars. You can get three or four tasty sheet cakes with individual toppers for $150-$200 dollars total. If it isn’t really important to you to have the huge tiered cake that is an excellent way to bring your cost down. And as I happily learned the other day if you use a new bakery and they want to show off their stuff a little bit and use pictures of your wedding for future advertisements they will often take those 3 sheet cakes and turn them into a tiered cake at no additional cost to you.
Thanks for the help, I can use all I can get! If anybody knows any other places, feel free to contribute.
We’re getting married NEXT year, though the 9/11 thing is interesting to think about. The $15,000 is our total budget but my fiancee predicts that under our requirements (gonna be late, 6 hours or so, on a Saturday, in the Bay Area, etc) that the venue is going to be the most important thing. She also says she can get the catering for a pretty reasonable price (cant remember the figure).
Really, as long as something seems doable within the 15k budget its within the realm of possibility for us. But we need to get on this because I’m finding places that are already booking for our wedding date (Sept/Oct of next year) and I’d hate to find a place we can actually afford that’s all booked up!
Check with catering companies. They might have some good ideas for beautiful parks with shelters, building lobbies, performing arts centers, etc. Some of the places you’d never think of having a reception end up being the perfect places. I’m sure there are some gorgeous buildings with stunning, large marble lobbies or a performing arts center with a secondary hall (or lobby) that could host a reception. Performing arts centers tend to have beautiful art on the walls. Another idea are the local universities. Maybe the student center has a large hall or the arts building has a large gallery/foyer/lobby/theater that would work.
Think outside of the box. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.
We got married in Lafayette, at a lovely outdoor location. We only had around 100 guests, but I know they were set up to handle a significantly bigger crowd - I don’t remember how big.
More generally, we relied heavily on a book called Here Comes the Guide. I don’t know if it still exists and is up-to-date, but it’s worth looking for.
I don’t know anything about venues, but look into Katrina Rozelle for the cake! Based in Alamo, branch in Oakland. (Why yes, I did work there, long ago.)
I’m not from the bay area but I just got back from there. How are vineyards on pricing? I went on a little wine tasting tour in Sonoma with my friends and we stopped at the Jacuzzi Winery and it was beautiful. Unfortunately, the linked page says it only seats 200. But, the site has more suggestions for the SF area.
Another tasting room we stopped at mentioned weddings as well. The lady told us how she threw a fantastic wedding for a family member at her winery on the cheap, but of course it was a family wedding.
Something to be aware of: Your choice of venue may limit your choice of caterers. When we got married we found that many venues have exclusive contracts with one or a short list of caterers.
So check out various caterers, but try not to fall in love with one until you have a venue fixed - you might need to change.
Yeah, this. We asked our caterer twice. The first time he had some good ideas that didn’t work out. We went back to him and said “Got any more ideas?” …And he said, “Hey, I forgot about this church that rents out their hall, you might be interested in them,” and, yeah, jackpot.
Hey, speaking of which, any chance the church you’re getting married at might have a large reception hall type place? (Ours didn’t, although they’re building one next year, sigh, so we were in the strange situation of having the wedding at one church and going to another for the reception… but it was awesome.)
This may be a dumb question but does Northern CA have a wedding off-season? If so that’s one thing to consider, it might make a difference on the venue rental fee. We’re in Chicago so I know it’s a totally different climate, but here September and October are peak wedding season – my SO does photography and those are his busiest months (and FWIW he booked 9/11).
Do what my sister did. Drive around, find a private road with a nice house at the end of it, pretend to be lost and explain you’re just driving aorund looking for a wedding location and wait for the owner to offer his house for rent!
Or not. I mean, really, who would ever have expected that to work?
Filoli or the Pulgas Water Temple are both lovely for outdoor weddings.
For indoor you might try checking out some of the finer hotels in the area, I got married in the courtyard at Stanford Park and it was beautiful, included catering, and was fairly reasonably priced.
For a cake you can’t do better than Prolific Oven in Palo Alto.
I might have the name wrong, but friends of mine had their wedding at Rengstorff House in Mountain View. It’s near Shoreline Park, along the same road as the road for the concert venue. They aren’t rich, so I doubt it was super duper expensive. But, I didn’t ask how much everything cost, so who knows. In any case, it was a beautiful venue. A nice house and outside area that allowed for the wedding and reception at the same spot.
Don’t know the capacity, either. But, hey, it was nice, at least I know that much.
