Wedding Journal

Hoping for the easiest experience possible (and hopefully the least expensive yet most practical dresses), I've done all my wedding dress shopping thus far online. My biggest beef with wedding gowns is that they're big and beautiful and cost all this money, yet I'll probably never be able to wear it again after the big day. So my plan, ideally, is to choose a dress that not only works well as a wedding dress, yet might be repurposed for other dressy / formal occasions as well.

With that in mind, I've been looking to less wedding-oriented merchants for my dress-shopping -- places like J. Crew or Nordstrom -- which offer reasonably priced dresses and flexible return policies.

I got an amazing deal today on two dresses I ordered from anntaylor.com. I picked two possible candidates and, halfway through the checkout process, decided on impulse to see if there were any coupon codes available for the site. A quick Google search brought me to a soon-to-expire promotional code for 20 percent off any purchase over $125, plus free shipping. The result: about $100 saved on my order.

Awesome.

Posted by Aly at 12:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We have a date! And a venue!

As Rob mentioned earlier, our visit to Hendry House last weekend went very well. He talked to Sharon on Monday about available dates, and we sent in our deposit on Tuesday. Since an official confirmation letter arrived in the mail on Saturday, it's safe to announce the official details:

Date: April 29, 2006
Location: Hendry House, Fort C.F. Smith Park, Arlington, Va.

We've rented the house from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m.. Since that time includes set-up and clean-up, we're tentatively assuming that the ceremony will begin around 4:30 p.m., with the reception to start immediately afterward. The ceremony likely will be held outside, on the patio in front of the house, while the reception will take place inside the house and on the large porch.

Our original tentative wedding date — April 8 — coincided with the end of the National Cherry Blossom Festival, so we'd tossed around the idea of going with a cherry blossom "theme" for the wedding. Now that the official date is much later in the month, we've decided to discard that idea and try something entirely different.

More details to come, as we figure them out.

Posted by Aly at 1:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

TheKnot.com has this semi-useful "Planning Calendar" page that breaks down, by month, what tasks a bride-to-be should be addressing. I say "semi-useful" for two reasons: 1) It assumes that the bride is starting her planning a full 12 months or more the event (I maintain that it's possible to pull off a nice wedding in a much smaller span of time) and 2) Some of the suggestions seem a bit silly, or at the very least directed toward a fairly high-class audience.

Case in point: At 8-10 months, the calendar suggests, "Decide what type of entertainment you want. A pianist for the cocktail hour, strolling violinists, a DJ, or band?" The general advice is sound, but strolling violinists? (Meanwhile, I'm debating whether to hire a DJ or just figure out how to hook my laptop up to a sound system and pray to the Party Shuffle gods that we get a good playlist.)

Granted, some of my cynicism has to do with the choices that we're making for our wedding, both to keep costs down and out of practicality. But now that I'm actually planning a wedding for myself rather than thinking fancifully of one, it seems especially clear the degree to which big wedding sites play to that fantasy wedding -- and the jaw-dropping costs that result (more money for The Knot, its advertisers and the rest of the bridal industry).

Posted by Aly at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Since Aly has so eloquently related the story of my proposal, I shall give you the story leading up to the moment — specifically the procurement of the ring. Before I begin, you should be aware of the following key fact:

I don't own a car.

I ordered the ring and had it shipped to my shared group house in Ballston; however, I was rarely there. Instead, I preferred to spend most of my time at Aly's much more spacious apartment. My roommates, like me, all worked during the day and couldn't sign for a FedEx package that kept being delivered at 11 a.m. or so. Hence, the ring ended up at the local FedEx distribution facility after three days of attempted delivery. I pondered my dilemma late on a Wednesday night in Aly's apartment. How would I get the ring without Aly knowing (or worse, driving me to sign for the package?) Could I pull this off in time to propose during our Chicago trip? Our flight was scheduled for 8 p.m. the next evening; we'd planned to go to the airport straight from work. I realized that I had to pick it up myself, and so I concocted the following plan: I would drive a rented vehicle (specifically a Zipcar) to the facility during my lunch break on Thursday and procure the ring.

I pulled out my wallet and checked for my Zipcard (the card you use to unlock the doors of Zipcar vehicles) upon deciding on the aforementioned plan. I came up empty — the card was back at the Ballston house, while I sat at my laptop in Aly's apartment. It was around 1 a.m. I checked to see that Aly was asleep and snuck out to her car. The gas was almost empty — this had been a topic of conversation earlier that evening — and I knew I wouldn't make it to Ballston and back. I went to the gas station and put in exactly one dollar of gas (not much these days since prices are so absurdly high), and watched the needle inch up a bit when I started the car. Perfect. I drove to Ballston and found the Zipcard rather quickly; after tucking it away in my wallet, I drove back to Alexandria and Aly's apartment. I arrived around 2 a.m. and went to bed.

Aly asked me if we should fill up the gas tank the next morning, and I replied, "It looks like the needle's gone back up a bit overnight. I guess we were just parked on an incline or something. Anyway, I think we'll be able to make it to work ..."

At around 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, I walked a couple blocks from my office to the location of the nearest Zipcar — a Toyota Prius with XM Satellite Radio installed on the rearview mirror — and unlocked the door with the Zipcard. I drove down to the FedEx facility, signed for the package, and got lunch at Quiznos. After I returned to my office, I tucked the ring away in my backpack for our trip to Chicago that evening. It didn't leave the backpack until just after sunset on Saturday.

Addendum:

1. I drove around a little bit more once I got back to Alexandria so the needle would go down further — a low-tech way to cover my tracks. I'm just glad we weren't doing this based on mileage; I would have had to run the car in reverse like they did in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
2. I noticed that Aly had posted to her blog while I was out doing my thing, and nearly freaked out. Turns out she had gotten up, looked around the apartment for me, and gone back to bed when she didn't see me. She had assumed that I was downstairs gathering laundry from the dryer. Whew!

Posted by Rob at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We scheduled an appointment to see the Hendry House — part of Fort C. F. Smith Park in Arlington, Virginia — last weekend after eliminating a number of other potential locations for various reasons (convenience, flexibility, cost, etc). The park is situated just off Spout Run Parkway, which runs towards the Potomac River and feeds into the George Washington Parkway. Sharon, our erstwhile tour guide, met us in the foyer of the house.

The house itself is lovely. It was built starting in 1901 — a "20th century mansion", as the Arlington County website calls it — and the interior and exterior have been recently renovated. We were taken on a tour around the ground floor of the house, and then up to the second floor. Sharon went to retrieve a book of photos from past weddings held at the Hendry House, and Aly and I took the time to put our heads together and discuss the merits of the venue. It didn't take us long, and we quickly came to the conclusion that this would be a perfect spot to hold the ceremony and the reception.

Having an indoor wedding — particularly the reception part — will undoubtedly turn out to be a large exercise in traffic management. The Hendry House has two large rooms, two porches, and a foyer; we're going to use all the available space to encourage our guests to mingle and move from room to room. A lot of thought and effort will go into setting up the floor plan for the wedding; however, it will be really, really cool to see how everything works out* on the big day!

* "Working out" is defined as guests mingling, moving about, and generally having a good time.

Posted by Rob at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Union Station? So off the list.

I contacted the Columbus Club for more information, and one of their special events planners responded with more information about the facility's rates and policies. The facility rental fee was what we expected ... but we nearly choked when we got to the part about catering. We would be required to use their caterer, and the charge for two hours of "light hors d'oeuvres" was $60/person. That's for a minimum party of 100.

Heh.

So, now for something completely different...

Rob and I have an appointment on Saturday to check out Hendry House, part of Arlington's C.F. Smith Park. The rental fee is "reasonable," and the list of "approved" caterers includes Lebanese Taverna, a Mediterranean restaurant we like.

Here's hoping this works out. Everything seems so up in the air right now: We can't even set a date until we know for sure that we have a venue.

Posted by Aly at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Clarendon Ballroom sent me their rate sheet and catering options yesterday, and I was a bit heartbroken at just how much it costs to rent out the art deco ballroom and/or the rooftop deck for an event -- to the tune of $4,800 for an 8-hour block on Saturday, or $3,300 on a Sunday. And no matter how much I like the space, that's way more than I'm comfortable paying.

I'm still waiting to hear back from Glen Echo Park, which boasts its own art deco ballroom and an interesting history, although I don't know if I should hold out much hope that it'll be within our still-ephemeral budget. (We don't know what our budget really is, number-wise, but we know we don't want to go over-the-top and go in debt over this wedding thing.)

Meanwhile, we're tentatively kicking around the idea of having the ceremony and reception at Union Station, in the Columbus Club. We need to look into pricing, catering requirements and whatnot, but Union Station seems like a great mix of all worlds, combining convenient location, a beautiful setting and our own interests in travel and architecture.

Posted by Aly at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now that the move is (just about) over and we're settling into our new place, we can start seriously thinking about the wedding. We've done some early research into possible venues for the ceremony and reception (ideally, in the same place, given that so many of our guests will be from out of town) and came away with a bit of sticker shock, to the tune of $1,500 or more for some of the venues we liked -- and that's just to reserve the facility!

For a bit of a laugh, I like to go look at the Corcoran Web site, where the contract to rent out the museum for private events demands a $15,000 fee (including a $13,000 "donation").

But we really need to buckle down and figure something out. We're looking at the first or second weekend in April, and I worry that, this being a big city, places will get booked up soon, if they aren't already.

Posted by Aly at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)