Most of the things you want to include in your wedding are optional, like your dress, having real or fake flowers, or not having a wedding cake and choosing cupcakes instead. There is one thing you can’t do without: the venue or place to get married. Ultimately, you need a location where your friends and family can meet you to celebrate your big day, that acts as the backdrop to your memories.
But it’s not always easy to find the right place to get married. A beautiful barn, an elegant ballroom, a cozy restaurant, or an empty warehouse transformed into an industrial wonderland are just a few of the endless ideas that can be consider when getting married in Oklahoma. To help you find the perfect venue, we asked local Oklahoma wedding planners and experts to share their top tips on what to consider before you embark on investing time going on venue tours.
To help you find the perfect venue, we asked local Oklahoma wedding planners to share their favorite venues and tips. Here is a compilation of what we found.
1. First Things First
The first thing you should do when choosing a wedding venue, or planning a wedding in large, is to determine the order in which you will book all the different types of wedding vendors. If where you get married is the most important thing to you. Then put it towards the top of your list. If this is hard for your to conceptualize you can receive completely free online wedding assistance and find the perfect venue for your Oklahoma Wedding by registering your wedding at www.orderweddings.com/registermywedding or by clicking here. Then an actual Oklahoma Wedding gurus will reach out and help you find the streamlined and tailored list of the best venues available for your wedding. They also have free online planning tools that help you with vendor communication, budget, seating chart, and guest list management.
2. Consult a trusted and chosen wedding planner.
Before you start looking at venues, of course, consulting another layer of help is imperative. There are a lot of insights that a wedding planner can lend that maybe you haven’t even considered. They know about the space’s capabilities as well as its layout and how long and what you’ll need to customize it to the ideas in your head. Your planner will inform you if there’s a creative way to make a specific idea possible by choosing a specific venue.
3.Choose a Venue or Location Category Type
Choosing a venue that fits the exact style you want for your wedding might seem overwhelming, especially since there are endless options and ideas that might be flooding your brain. In order to make your wedding feel more like it fits in with the space, choose a venue that fits with and enhances your theme rather than forming your plans around the venue. For example, If you want to have a modern wedding, you can choose to look at art galleries, well-designed restaurants, or warehouses or a ballroom. On the other hand, a wedding theme or idea with more natural outdoor elements works well in places like parks, backyards, barns, and ranches. By deciding which venue type best fits your ideas you will easily narrow down your options; and when you actually start searching on our site (orderweddings.com) you can easily navigate a specific venue category that fits your idea of a wedding, rather than spending hours looking through venues that don’t fit your thoughts and ideas towards a wedding.
4.Consider And Build Your Guest List
Having an idea of how many people you’re planning to invite will save you a lot of headaches and heartaches down the road. witChoose a venue that is too small for your guest list will cause you to potentially offending people by not inviting them. Also, If more people RSVP with “yes” than you can fit in the space, you might be in trouble and you and guests will run into some uncomfortable situations. It’s common for couples to underestimate how many people they’ll have in attendance (or how many their parents will want to come, too). So start having that conversation early so you can figure out what you’re dealing with. Make a list of all your friend and family (both sides) and rank them on the probability of their attendance.
5. Budget
We put “budget” under guest on this list of tips for a specific reason, because a lot of your variable and hard costs stem from how many guests you will have in attendance. By figuring out what is important to you both first you will easily be able to determine where to allocate your wedding budget. To help with your wedding budget, Orderweddings.com offers in depth wedding budgeting tools that help you determine not only your order of importance of things to include in your wedding day but it also easily allows you to adjust your budget and give you a clear idea of how much of your budget to allocate to your venue based on what is important to your specific wedding needs.
6. What Is Included In The Wedding Venue Packages
Some venues are all inclusive and do everything for you, and some do not. Some include tables and chairs and some do not. Some are just an empty shell and allows full customization opportunities and some offer you a large selection of amenities. Venues with in-house catering, like hotels, will charge a fee per plate fee and others include deco flowers for an additional up-charge. All these things need to be considered before choosing your venues to tour. By knowing ho w much your total budget is, as well as how much it will cost to make your design come to life in advance you will be able to navigate your tours better and save so much time. Orderweddings.com Concierge Services recommends to “Break down your overall budget into different categories, giving more money to the vendors that are more important.” Then when choosing a venue consult your wedding budget tool and remove expenses if they are included in your potential wedding. By following this tip, as soon as you pick your venue, you then will also know what you still need to reach your ideal dream wedding rather than working backwards and having a large chance of going over budget or missing something important that you want to include in your Big Day.
7. Think About Your Guests Experience.
Obviously, this is your wedding day and your ideals are priority, but your friends and family’s comfort and enjoyment should be important as well since they are investing time to celebrate with you. For example, It is important to keep in mind that out of town guests will probably need a hotel that is close to the venue and transportation to and from your wedding. So choosing a venue in town rather than out of town might be the best option. Also, by choosing a venue that doesn’t fit your guest count you run the risk of not having enough room for catering tables and dance floor space, not to mention everyone might feel like they are in a crowded space and potentially feel uncomfortable, causing them to leave early and leaving you with no one left in your grand exit photos at the end of the night.
8. Stay True To What You Want Out Of Your Wedding Day.
So many times people get their ideas and choose a wedding venue based on what they saw in stylized shoots used for marketing photos, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook etc., However, its important to keep in mind that you literally can customize your wedding in as much detail as you want and the venue can play a huge part in the success of that vision. Just because the price seems perfect on the surface level, if you do not dig deep and look at all the details that come with that venue, you might end up paying more or making a poor decision that can effect various areas of your wedding. Determine what you want first, ask the important venue questions to see if it fits. After that your potential list of venue options should be streamlined and you should be prepared to schedule your venue tours. If you show up at the venue tour and it is a great fit then we suggest that you book that venue asap. (Since popular venues often book out on popular dates sometimes up to a year in advance)
In Conclusion
We hope these tips help you understand all that goes into choosing the perfect Oklahoma Wedding Venue and things you should consider before scheduling your venue tours. For free Oklahoma wedding planning assistance sign up for free Oklahoma Concierge Services by registering your wedding at www.orderweddings.com/registermywedding
Happy Wedding Planning!