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So. Destination wedding. Who here has done it? Did you visit first? Thoughts? Things to be aware of? Will a Sandals resort (ugh) give us an expensive garbage generic wedding package (we have a very strong theme that we are 100% committed to, don't want flowers, don't want cake, do want very good beer, not willing to compromise on those 3 points at all, probably have some other weird poo poo we would like and standard poo poo we don't, etc) or will it be a cool all-inclusive stress free experience? If we try to plan without some kind of all-inclusive business, what should we be aware of? Edit: the husband has a wild hair about trying this out and I am trying valiantly to humor him but I think there are a lot of additional difficulties he is just not thinking of. Nicol Bolas fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Oct 28, 2015 |
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Oct 28, 2015 01:45
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At most venues, good beer is very hard to get unless you provide your own. Premium beer is usually something like Heineken. At a resort which probably doesn't even have good beer at all, good luck.
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Oct 28, 2015 12:05
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Nicol Bolas posted:So. Destination wedding. Who here has done it? Did you visit first? Thoughts? Things to be aware of? Will a Sandals resort (ugh) give us an expensive garbage generic wedding package (we have a very strong theme that we are 100% committed to, don't want flowers, don't want cake, do want very good beer, not willing to compromise on those 3 points at all, probably have some other weird poo poo we would like and standard poo poo we don't, etc) or will it be a cool all-inclusive stress free experience? If we try to plan without some kind of all-inclusive business, what should we be aware of? If good beer is high on your list, you should look into a brewery as a venue. I know Stone Brewery in San Diego does weddings and they seem pretty accommodating - http://www.stoneworldbistro.com/events/bookevent.asp I think you should definitely visit your venue before you book - not only to check out the surroundings (pictures can be deceiving) but to meet the staff and get a feel for how reliable they are. You need someone on the ground if you're doing a destination wedding, whether that is the coordinator that comes with the all-inclusive place, or someone you hire independently. The destination weddings I've been to definitely don't seem like easy, stress-free experiences... they seem expensive and a headache to coordinate so many people - and you are kind of on the hook for entertaining your guests for the whole weekend, not just one night. Here's a blog post that might help: http://www.sparkhatch.com/blog/2015/8/5/how-to-plan-a-destination-wedding
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Oct 28, 2015 15:33
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Another fun thing about destination weddings: either you use the venue's photographer as part of the package, or you basically pay for your photographer's vacation.
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Oct 28, 2015 16:05
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Today's the day, been up since 5:30am getting ready (I'd rather sit and wait all ready than rush, which apparently is an unheard of thing to ~some~ family members). So excited!
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Oct 30, 2015 12:01
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ilysespieces posted:Today's the day, been up since 5:30am getting ready (I'd rather sit and wait all ready than rush, which apparently is an unheard of thing to ~some~ family members). So excited! Hey congrats, I have an old buddy of mine from HS that's getting married today too. You wouldn't happen to be in the Bay Area and have a giant ginger beard (or an almost-husband with one), would you?
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Oct 30, 2015 16:42
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C-Euro posted:Hey congrats, I have an old buddy of mine from HS that's getting married today too. You wouldn't happen to be in the Bay Area and have a giant ginger beard (or an almost-husband with one), would you? Beardy husband(!!) yes, ginger and Bay Area, no. NYC and jew-y.
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Oct 31, 2015 04:11
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What is the earliest we could request RSVPs be due by (knowing that we will have to call and harass to get replies)? A month before? This isn't a "destination" wedding, but 90% of the guest list is going to have to drive >500 miles or fly in.
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Nov 2, 2015 03:53
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John Cenas Jorts posted:What is the earliest we could request RSVPs be due by (knowing that we will have to call and harass to get replies)? A month before? This isn't a "destination" wedding, but 90% of the guest list is going to have to drive >500 miles or fly in. A month to six weeks is pretty standard. We had a similar situation and we set the deadline 5 weeks out so we had a week to call/harass/send thugs with baseball bats after the people who hadn't RSVP'd before all of our final headcounts were due. No matter how generous of a deadline you give people you'll still get a dismaying portion of your guest list who can't be bothered to check a box on a card and stick the pre-addressed stamped envelope in their mailbox.
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Nov 2, 2015 04:34
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We are doing electronic save-the-dates and invites. All our guests have to do is click a box, and I'm resigned to the fact that half of them won't do it.
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Nov 2, 2015 17:42
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You are severely overestimating how capable your older guests are technology wise. I set up a google voice number that went to a voicemail simply asking guests to leave their RSVP for our engagement party (we had kind of a big engagement party) and people still couldn't manage that.
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Nov 3, 2015 00:18
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Do you have a paper backup for great aunt Bertha who doesn't have an internet connection? What if your mass mailing of invitations goes into everyone's spam folders? Unless your guest list is all technologically savvy and under 60 years old electronic invites could become a huge pain in the rear end pretty quick. IMO the happy medium is to provide an online RSVP system and include a card with the URL (and your phone number for people who don't do internet) in the physical invites.
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Nov 3, 2015 00:50
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We don't have anyone older than 60 coming (all grand parents are deceased) and everyone else is technologically savvy enough, so yeah.
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Nov 3, 2015 03:09
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So I posted in this thread literally two years ago asking about Rings. Since then I sucessfully bought an engagement ring, she proposed, said yes, and we got married two weeks ago  Yay! Now she has an engagement ring and a wedding ring, but they rub against eachother and scuff the other ring. We've heard you can get rings fused together but what does this entail? What should we look out for? Does anyone in Melbourne, Australia know of a good place to go to? We live in the eastern suburbs but don't really know where to start and am paranoid about taking it to a random jeweller to do it.
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Nov 3, 2015 22:26
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Anyone ever used Costco's wedding/bulk floral department?
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Nov 4, 2015 01:44
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overdesigned posted:Anyone ever used Costco's wedding/bulk floral department? I've heard good things about it. We ended up buying our flowers from an online wholesaler instead only because we didn't want to pay for a Costco membership just to buy flowers once.
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Nov 4, 2015 02:57
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overdesigned posted:Anyone ever used Costco's wedding/bulk floral department? I haven't used their wedding floral department, per se, but we did buy a couple of pre-made bouquets and cannabalized them to make our flowers. I got married in a garden, so the only flowers we needed were the lady bouquets.
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Nov 4, 2015 03:36
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overdesigned posted:Anyone ever used Costco's wedding/bulk floral department? We got married last year and we ordered our flowers in bulk through Costco. They were a good price, I believe we paid around $400 for all the flowers/greens for ten bouquets, all the boutonnieres and corsages, and all centerpieces with some left over. Their delivery was great, they were expected to arrive the Wednesday before at 10 a.m. and they were there at 10 on the nose. And besides that they looked amazing. Really, really happy with how everything turned out and I always recommend people go that route if they don't mind putting everything together themselves. We probably saved a grand doing it that way.
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Nov 4, 2015 03:42
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Ok, so the wedding is done and over! Everything went pretty much without a hitch, the only incident was the cake was late getting delivered. The guy delivering it got lost and said his phone died, and someone it took him 2 hours to find his way to the venue. But he made it with 30 minutes to spare before the ceremony started, and the owner was extremely apologetic for it and hand delivered a dozen cupcakes to us a few days later as a way of saying sorry, all things considered it could have been worse. A big bummer is that the lake behind the ceremony area dried up due to lack of water. It didn't look too bad and if you didn't know there was supposed to be a lake there, you probably wouldn't even realize that you were looking at an empty lake bed. However our photographer was great and I think the photos turned out excellent:  Our photographer got us our pictures crazy fast, the wedding was on 10/24 and last night he had them ready for us to download already. We love the albums he does but I think his cheapest album is $1600 dollars, and quite frankly we don't have that kind of money to spend on an album. We like the rustic leather album look, something along the lines of what Blue Sky Paper is selling: http://www.blueskypapers.com/leather-rustic-album.html But all of the options I am seeing for this are to buy just a regular photo album and you put the pictures in yourself. Does anyone know of a photo book service where you can upload your photos, then receive an album with a cover like this that has printed pages versus mounting them ourselves? My wife and I agree that would be the preferable method because quite frankly we think it looks better than mounting the pictures.
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Nov 4, 2015 23:03
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Our photographer recommended mpix for printing photos and they appear to do photo books as well. http://www.mpix.com/products/photobooks We never ordered a photo album but we've gotten a bunch of pictures printed off of mpix and they all turned out nicely.
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Nov 5, 2015 00:23
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I had seen their website during the course of my research, and while it looks like they make fine products, it sadly doesn't really have the style we would ideally like to get.
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Nov 5, 2015 00:57
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stabbity posted:I'm in the middle of planning for an October 2016 wedding, and this is almost exactly what we're doing (except in Milwaukee, not SF). My best friend is incredibly frustrated with me/our plans because they're so not traditional. I've had a lot of "but you HAVE to have *insert random traditional wedding thing*! You're going to be so disappointed if you don't!" thrown at me over the last few weeks. It will never end What's up October 2016 wedding buddy?  Just got engaged last week (at Epcot no less!), and we want to have our wedding next year on the same date. We're still deciding between whether or not we want to do a cruise/destination wedding and keep it really small (as mentioned previously) or do a local Justice of the Peace/big reception instead. We might be leaning more towards the latter, especially since it would be on Halloween weekend, and I think I can talk him into having a Halloween-themed wedding. That would be cool and not dumb, right? 
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Nov 5, 2015 02:50
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We got an invitation returned to us from the post office today, three weeks after the wedding and nine weeks since the invites were mailed. Where was it all that time???
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Nov 5, 2015 19:41
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That happened to us, I just assume the people now living at that address just took forever to send it back.
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Nov 5, 2015 19:54
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Porkchop Express posted:The guy delivering it got lost and said his phone died, and someone it took him 2 hours to find his way to the venue. I had a wedding last year where the cake fell over just before I told the bride that in two more songs we would cut the sucker. Cue the venue frantically reassembling a cake and then having me hard stop a song to send the bride and groom over (before it crumbled under it's own weight). Frankly, I'm amazed it worked out in the end. Wedding season is over for me. Did 30 I think this summer? I'm glad I don't have to put on a suit this weekend. Just gonna DJ a club and play nasty dirty hip hop all night instead because gam-gam and the grandkids aren't in the house.
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Nov 6, 2015 06:00
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At David's bridal with the fiancee and she's trying on dresses. I'm the only man here e: but she looks beautiful!
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Nov 10, 2015 00:57
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Massasoit posted:At David's bridal with the fiancee and she's trying on dresses. I hope you have netflix
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Nov 10, 2015 01:03
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Naw, she hates shopping more than I do. Tried on 4 dresses, and we think we found the one. And only $400 too.
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Nov 10, 2015 04:24
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teacup posted:So I posted in this thread literally two years ago asking about Rings. Since then I sucessfully bought an engagement ring, she proposed, said yes, and we got married two weeks ago I don't know where to go in Austaralia, but I have been part of the jewelry industry my whole life and worked in it for 13years (my dad is a gemologist). Most places will solder you rings together for free if you bought both of them there. Otherwise expect to pay $50-100 to have them soldered together (recommended top and bottom if the ring design allows for it). Soldering your rings together is a really great thing to do as it cuts down hugely on wear and tear/maintenance and will extend the life of your ring. Soldering rings together is super basic, so you don't really have to worry about a place being a super amazing at custom designing things by hand or anything. The biggest thing to look out for is if they do it in house or send it out to be done somewhere else. Generally places that do their work in house are going to treat your rings with more care and attention and aren't going to use cheap rushed labor to get it done.
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Nov 10, 2015 20:51
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The church we were trying to work with has stopped responding to our communication attempts. Fiancé emailed a different church and got a confirmation within 48 hours, with plans to make the deposit this week. It's also a bigger church that should suit our needs a lot more easily. Awesome! We have my rings and his has been ordered. We have invitations ready to print and we're about halfway on all our addresses. I am going to David's Bridal on Thursday to see what's up and if I can find a dress that makes me look like a decent adult. We haven't gotten much done, but I feel so accomplished!
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Nov 11, 2015 03:01
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Any guides or equipment recommendations for keeping wedding & engagement rings clean?
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Nov 14, 2015 21:15
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C-Euro posted:Any guides or equipment recommendations for keeping wedding & engagement rings clean? Assuming your rings are made from standard metals and gems (no pearls or fragile things), get an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner.
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Nov 14, 2015 22:12
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Or take it somewhere. Most places will clean for free or cheap.
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Nov 14, 2015 22:18
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vyst posted:Or take it somewhere. Most places will clean for free or cheap. I definitely recommend taking it somewhere. Ultra sonic cleaners can cause diamonds and other gems to come loose or fall out, especially if used too frequently. While pretty much all jewelry stores use ultra sonic cleaners, they are probably going to be better at making sure things aren't in there longer than they have to be, and since try can be out of the way help cut down on how often you are exposing your rings to it. Also, the cleaners they use will be much better (and better regulated) than what you can get at home. Bonus if you can find a jeweler that will polish and steam your rings when they clean them.
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Nov 15, 2015 02:39
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Hey, the jeweller links in the OP are really cool, but is there a recommended place to go for really basic wedding bands? For myself (groom) I just want a a rounded gold band with two incised lines, one close to either end. I need a size 9.25, which I understand can be hard to get. But the closest thing I've found is like $900, which seems way high to me.
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Nov 15, 2015 21:26
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Something like this? http://www.e-weddingbands.com/store/kelleygmain.html Depending on the width you want, the actual gold starts to cost a bit.
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Nov 16, 2015 00:51
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Apollodorus posted:Hey, the jeweller links in the OP are really cool, but is there a recommended place to go for really basic wedding bands? For myself (groom) I just want a a rounded gold band with two incised lines, one close to either end. I need a size 9.25, which I understand can be hard to get. But the closest thing I've found is like $900, which seems way high to me. gold bands are based on weight and since gold is staying really high, you can expect a gold band to cost $125-$150/gram. Most places don't add labor costs on top of that for basic bands with simple designs like carved straight lines. $900 is pretty average these days for a decent gold band that will last you. If you are looking in the $400-500 range for the same width you will be getting something much lighter weight that won't last as long maintenance wise and will have to be replaced much sooner. The nice thing about gold vs. alternative metals is that while it costs more, it can be sized, and it can be melted down and turned into other things in the future. And it doesn't really lose it's value. Alternative metals are great because they are cheap and if you lose them they are cheaper to replace. Plus they come in cool designs that you can't get in gold. However, once you leave the store with them they lose all of their value. The things to really consider are of course your budget, but also what you value in your ring. If it is cost and look, go with alternative metals. If it is flexibility and longevity, and you are able to spend the money, go with gold.
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Nov 16, 2015 01:04
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Loud Mouse posted:I definitely recommend taking it somewhere. Ultra sonic cleaners can cause diamonds and other gems to come loose or fall out, especially if used too frequently. While pretty much all jewelry stores use ultra sonic cleaners, they are probably going to be better at making sure things aren't in there longer than they have to be, and since try can be out of the way help cut down on how often you are exposing your rings to it. Also, the cleaners they use will be much better (and better regulated) than what you can get at home. Bonus if you can find a jeweler that will polish and steam your rings when they clean them. We actually have been taking it a local jeweler who's been doing it for free, but I was wondering if there was a good in-home solution so that I don't have to keep making trips out there (we like our rings to be immaculate, so much so that we don't keep them on 100% of the time). Also because it's a pain in the rear end to get there but they just opened up a store near my workplace so I guess I will just go there. Thanks.
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Nov 16, 2015 01:12
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C-Euro posted:We actually have been taking it a local jeweler who's been doing it for free, but I was wondering if there was a good in-home solution so that I don't have to keep making trips out there (we like our rings to be immaculate, so much so that we don't keep them on 100% of the time). Also because it's a pain in the rear end to get there but they just opened up a store near my workplace so I guess I will just go there. Thanks. Do they offer a jewelry cleaning solution that you can use at home in between more detailed cleanings? A lot of places carry the same brand but with their logo on it for pretty cheap. You basically just soak your rings for a little bit and then rinse them off. The biggest thing is to not use any chemicals and to never use anything abrasive, like a tooth brush, tooth paste, alcohols, acetone, etc. I sometimes use hot water with a couple drops of dawn dish soap and wipe things down with a microfiber cloth. If you have diamonds, this will help get some of the grease off to make them shiny again, but it doesn't clean all the gunk out of the cracks. If you have opals, emeralds, pearls, or any other soft/easily damaged stone, I don't recommend this or home ultrasonics at all. At our store we would just give super soft or delicate stones a quick second long dip in the ultra sonic, rinse, and then steam them. Pearls we just wiped down with a soft cloth because pearls are epoxied onto their settings and the ultrasonic/putting them in water, would loosen the glue. Plus most pearls are farmed and are therefore only a thin coating of nacre over various types of materials. edit: also keep in mind that over cleaning your rings could damage them in the long run and cause stones to get loose faster than they would on their own. Definitely don't be cleaning your jewelry every week. You should really only be polishing/using and ultra sonic every couple months. Using a couple drops of dawn and some hot water on a weekly basis should help supplement more involved cleanings. Loud Mouse fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Nov 16, 2015 |
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Nov 16, 2015 02:18
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Nicol Bolas posted:So. Destination wedding. Who here has done it? Did you visit first? Thoughts? Things to be aware of? Will a Sandals resort (ugh) give us an expensive garbage generic wedding package (we have a very strong theme that we are 100% committed to, don't want flowers, don't want cake, do want very good beer, not willing to compromise on those 3 points at all, probably have some other weird poo poo we would like and standard poo poo we don't, etc) or will it be a cool all-inclusive stress free experience? If we try to plan without some kind of all-inclusive business, what should we be aware of? 2 logistics questions upfront: Do you expect people to show? Where are you traveling from? Numbers of people can make a very big impact on destination wedding. Obviously everyone's experience is different. Where you are a citizen defines where you can choose, many countries have residency requirements to get married in them. We chose Gibraltar, which is off of spain and beautiful - I'd suggest it even for a bigger wedding - depending on where you're traveling from. My wife and I had approximately 4 people in total including ourselves, the groundskeeper and a photographer. So zero people actually pulled through - tons had said they would come, even my wife's sister and both her parents and mine declined in the end. We chose Gibraltar because US citizens can marry there. Spain itself had residency requirements unless you were...catholic I think? Let me know in a PM if you want to see the wedding photos from the venue, which was ridiculously cheap to rent too (about $200). I'll link my whole album. It was more like "married in a courthouse" in terms of atmosphere, less like "married in a banquet hall". It was also outdoors and effectively on the Mediterranean sea. On the plus side: you may be able to find a photographer locally no matter where you choose for the destination wedding that is both a million times cheaper while offering more services. Ours was $650 or so, and we got all the cleaned up photos and the digital copies of the raws. The hardest part for me was honestly coordinating the marriage application, which took about 2 weeks of wire transfers in foreign currencies and emails back and forth due to timezones, plus a visit to sign stuff before the wedding. The rest was ridiculously simple. notwithoutmyanus fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Nov 16, 2015 |
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Nov 16, 2015 02:50
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