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Originally Posted by celstu1  Oh my gosh! That is a LONG day! Kind of nice though, you truly get the whole day celebrating together with all your friends & family.
Over here in my neck of the woods, a modest wedding, which is what we are having is VERY expensive and usually most halls put a 5-6 hour cap on the time. We have the hall from 11am - 4pm. I am really bummed because the day will go something like 11:10am ceremony until 1130am, then 45 mins for pics for us and cocktail hour for guests. Then 1230 introductions into the dinner, first dances, then dinner at 1, cake cutting about 115, then dinner done by 230, then dancing only until 4. I really really wanted to get more time, but the hall won't do it.  To get a couple more hours would have meant renting the hall for the rest of the night, then they make you book the rooms surrounding the hall since they can't use them because of the noise. Then the DJ is an additional $100 an hour! (I went into the wrong business I swear!) So for a moderate wedding like that, we are looking at $72 per guest for just dinner. $4 per guest for just dessert, we have a cash bar because we can't afford to pay for drinks for our guests, we have 75 guests and our wedding is around $15k! I wonder why weddings are decreasing, prices are too outrageous for anyone to afford in this economy! We estimated our favors cost about $4 per guest, not too bad. |
Oh my goodness!!! I thought our wedding was expensive but it seems way more in your area! We have about the same budget as you do, for about 120-150 guests. My brother is using just a hall (as opposed to a hotel) for his wedding next year, and I think it's about $400 to rent for Saturday (all day) and an extra $200 or so to rent the Friday and Sunday so they can decorate the day before and clean up the day after. We just didn't want to deal with all the extras that come with that... a caterer, plates, cutlery, extra decor, etc.
We will get our hotel "ballroom" for all of Saturday. We will know two weeks before the wedding whether we are able to decorate Friday or Saturday morning. They told us usually decorating happens Friday, unless someone schedules another event that night, but it's rare. We do have to have the main stuff cleaned up and presents removed that night, but we get a complimentary gift opening room in the hotel the next day, so we can move them right to where they need to be. The other nice thing is the hotel does all the catering so we just have to choose our menu! And because we are paying per guest for the catering, we technically get the ballroom free for using their services, and we also get a complimentary honeymoon suite in the hotel that night with a Jacuzzi tub and chocolate covered strawberries and roses lol, and complimentary brunch for two in the morning
Overall, it's a pretty good deal because we're not having to pay for all of that stuff extra if we wanted it!
We are doing a "Toonie bar" for drinks. For those who don't know, a toonie is our $2 coin lol. We are allowed to buy our own alcohol for the bar, as long as we don't charge more than $2 per drink. So we will sell drink tickets, and hopefully make back a good chunk of what we're spending on the drinks. If we used the hotel bar, they charged $5.25 per drink. But we can buy it cheaper than that, and we can take back any unopened cases and get our money back for them! We will pay hotel bartenders though instead of using our family for it.