The Blank Canvas: Revisiting our Reception Site

Remember the dream reception site that became our actual reception venue? Well, in my excited haze I forgot to mention one tiny detail—it's a completely blank canvas. By blank canvas I mean that it comes with nothing, and by nothing I mean...absolutely nothing. There will be no chairs, no tables, no stock linens and no glassware included with the rental. The Seals get the main hall, two side lobbies, a mezzanine and two bathrooms. Oh, and a light switch that will turn on the ginormous chandeliers.

At first I saw this as a good thing. We would have the opportunity to dress this place up any way we wanted—ghost chairs, chiavari chairs, wooden chairs. Heck yeah! The possibilities are endless. Unfortunately for the Seals, however, we do not have an endless supply of cash to fuel any and every wedding day vision, so the excitement was short-lived.

Though Mama and Daddio Seal have graciously offered to pay for the vast majority of the wedding, I, in absolutely no way, want to take advantage of their generosity. As such, it has been a top priority for me to find the absolute best deals on everything (I get my jollies snagging deals anyway). From my experience finding bargain deals on designer bags, I knew that I could have the wedding I always dreamed of without gauging my parents' bank accounts—I just needed to do some research. 

My first order of business was to look into rental companies to provide our chairs and tables. After we established our color palette, I knew I wanted gold chiavari chairs and that nothing else would suffice. Boy was I in for a swift kick to the arse. I soon found that, unless your venue comes with the chairs, THEY ARE NOT CHEAP. (I'm talking $11-15 per chair here in SF, people—not including setup and breakdown.) I continued researching and found equally horrifying rates for tables, glassware, silverware and linens. 

Silly me hadn't factored in all of these costs and that made me sad.

Sad Seal via Zopassos

Finding someone to do the setup and the breakdown was also a big priority for me. While researching the rental companies I found they charge overtime rates for a "late night pick-up", and seeing as how all of our wedding day has to be cleared out of the site by 3am, a morning pick-up during regular hours was not an option. This left me with three avenues to explore: hire a wedding coordinator with a team who will figure all of this out for me, pay loads extra to have a rental company setup and take away everything, or enlist the help of my friends and family.

I immediately knew that I didn't want to ask my invited guests to work on my wedding day. I know that this method has been very successful at other people's weddings and I admire that, but I couldn't see how it would work at mine. The main reason being that I know I will want nothing more than to eat a late-night snack and crash after the reception—how could I do that with a clear conscience if my equally exhausted (and quite probably inebriated) guests were working away at cleaning up my wedding?

Thankfully, before having to seriously consider any of the options, I was introduced to the magical world of full-service catering. Apparently our venue's list of preferred caterers only includes companies that will provide everything—setup, food, rentals and breakdown. After some preliminary investigation I found this was not only going to be more affordable, but more convenient as well. Double win!

Now I just had to research all 15 of my venue's caterers. Sigh.

What kind of rentals, if any, does your venue provide? Who is setting up and breaking down everything?