Wedding Update!

Wedding Update:
So as most of you know, Mike and I were supposed to be getting married on October 17th, 2020 …. but the year had other plans. Our story does have a happy ending but it was a whirlwind of emotions and a constant changing of plans to settle on a new clear plan, so here is the journey of being a bride in 2020:

We made the decision to postpone our wedding immediately way back in the beginning of April when everything was up in the air and honestly, we felt great about making that call early on so that we didn’t have to stress as our date got closer. We were able to secure the same date just pushed to the following October in 2021. Of course we were bummed to be pushing the wedding but we knew it was the right call so we didn’t get too worked up about it.

We had literally sent our ‘Save the Date’ out just a few days before the stay at home orders were put in place…major eyerolll. So, as soon as we made the call to postpone, we quickly sent out ‘Change the Dates’ (something I never thought I would ever have to do). **HOT TIP If you are in the process of looking for save the dates, or change the dates, I used Zola for both and loooved how easy it was to create them. You can pick samples to test out and there are so many paper styles to choose from + ways to edit and customize your invites!

VIEW FROM OUR ORIGINAL VENUE

A few days after we sent out our Change the Dates, we found out some terrible news. Our venue — La Venta Inn, in Palos Verdes, a DREAM venue for us — went bankrupt and to make matters worse, they weren’t planning on giving us back our initial deposit. (Thankfully we had only put one deposit down at this point, but other couples were not as lucky). What’s even crazier is that the venue never even reached out to  inform us of what was going on…..we only found out because we saw that they had deleted their instagram. When we went to their website to see why, that is where we found out that they were shutting down. So now we were panicking not sure what to do and it was starting to hit us that we had to start over from scratch to plan a basically a whole new wedding weekend. Since we had sent the new Save the Dates out, we were holding on to hope that whatever new venue we chose would have the same date we were planning on AND that all of our vendors would be available if they did not happen to have the same date. #stress

Here’s where things got even more complicated. We had booked a huge room block at a nearby hotel — we booked 30 rooms since so many wedding guests would be traveling from New York — yikes. We called the hotel as soon as we found out about the venue and told them what happened and that we needed to cancel since we no longer had a wedding venue. At this point, we were throwing around ideas of just having a small family wedding back home, we were really open to anything. Unfortunately, the hotel told us that they would not be giving us ANY money back and that our only option was to find a venue nearby or we lose our money from the room block deposit. Just to be clear, yes we did sign a contract but every other hotel and venue in the area was giving money back as this was something completely out of our control. If you’ve ever been to Palos Verdes then you know, there aren't many venue options to choose from…and by not many I mean zero other options. So we started looking all the way up the coast to Malibu for a new venue. We saw some gorgeous places but at the end of the day, we didn’t want to have to bus our guests on an hour trip up the coast from the hotel to a venue and back again. Plus, so many venues in Malibu were already booked for 2021 or had crazy restrictions and rules. Additionally, most villas in Malibu don’t come with a catering crew, staff, seating and everything else that is usually planned through a venue. So it was becoming extremely overwhelming.

Here are a few of the venues that we looked at as we traveled up the coast: Villa Sancti (we almost booked this one), Bel Air Bay Club, Malibu Seaview Estate, Cypress Seacove, Malibu West Beach Club & Historic Adamson House

One day, back at home in New York I was getting super discouraged and losing sight of why were planning a wedding in the first place. I was starting to feel like I just wanted to have a tiny wedding but then felt guilty because I knew how much money we would lost from the hotel + in my heart I knew that really wasn’t what I wanted. My best friend happened to remember the name of a hotel in Palos Verdes that I had mentioned once in passing. When she brought it up I brushed it off telling her that it would be too expensive to have there plus I thought they were booked already so there was no point in reaching out. She kept pushing me to text my wedding planner Stephy so I did and within a few hours she got back to me saying that there was ONE opening left and it was on a weekend in October. It wasn’t the exact date we originally wanted but it was actually better - the Friday of Columbus Day weekend. Normally we wouldn’t have wanted a Friday but with the circumstances + the fact that it was a holiday weekend, we were sold.

During all of this, we found out that the credit card company would be giving us our deposit back from La Venta Inn due to ‘services not rendered’. YAY! Such a huge weight off of my shoulders knowing that my parents got that deposit back. ** HOT TIP If you are in the process of booking a venue, I highly recommend putting your deposit down on a credit card if you have that option! If anything goes wrong, you have a second source to speak to and work things out with that may be able to help you.

SO we finally were able to lock down our new venue and date and thankfully all of our vendors were still available on this new date to service the wedding! Finally things were falling into place. The last piece of the puzzle was figuring out our hotel situation. Our new venue is a resort so I wanted our guests to stay there to make it more seamless. Unfortunately, the original hotel still wouldn’t give us our money back. They were so rude and unapologetic. They even told us that they already had another wedding staying the same weekend as us, so they were honestly just being greedy. After fighting with them, they finally caved and decided to give us 50% of our deposit back and the other 50% could be used as a credit (not that any of us ever wanted to stay there again after all of this craziness). ** HOT TIP Do not book a huge room block when booking your hotel. Keep it small and ask if there is an option to add more people to the room block as it starts filling up if you need. Additionally, make sure you don’t get charged for the room block until the weekend of your wedding. The hotel for some reason charged us immediately upon booking which we later realized shouldn’t have happened.

Okay, we made it through the wedding saga story! I know that was long but i’m sure sooo many of you can relate and the other half of you can’t even fathom having to go through all of this to plan a wedding weekend. 2020 was a crazy year for all of us and thankfully we stuck to our guns of what we wanted our wedding weekend to look like and even through all of the stress, believed that everything would work out how it was supposed to.

I’m so excited to continue sharing more of our story that I haven’t shared yet. Like picking out my wedding dress, bridesmaids dresses, mother of the bride dress. How we found and chose our wedding planner and vendors and so much more! Let me know if there are other topics you want me to cover to help you make your big day the best it can be too!

xo Tori