Planning a Wedding Part 2

When we left off I was starting to feel stressed out about planning a Northern Michigan wedding in 8 months at a resort.

Jus and I want our wedding to be a display of who we are, personal touches and a showcase of the places and people we love.

The reason I love Northern Michigan so much is it's wildness, the small towns and the lack of people. When my family goes on vacation we try to stay in small places that give you a feel of the land and the people. The more I thought about a resort wedding the more I worried that it would be too cookie cutter and wouldn't express my love for the wilderness of Northern Michigan.

The resorts we looked at are very beautiful, they offer amenities that smaller venues don't and would have someone on staff to help me plan our wedding. But the thought that kept playing over and over in my head was that between the distance and having someone I had never met helping to plan that the wedding would not truly be an expression of Jus & me.

How could I convey the breezy, colorful, elegant, vintage feeling I wanted when I had trouble expressing my vision to Jus?

I was loosing sleep thinking about planning a wedding in Northern Michigan in 8 months and in order to maintain my sanity we started talking about other options.

A further destination with a smaller guest list, a hometown wedding with a large guest list or scratch it all and elope.

The most obvious choice for where to have our wedding is our hometown. Our town is home to about 30,000 people and our downtown is in the process of being revitalized. Jus bought a house here last year and we try to support local business and our community as much as possible.

My family is in a unique position in our town.

My parents have run our diner for the last 24 years and it is an institution among locals. Three years ago their restaurant was featured on national tv and since then we have seen a lot of tourists.

My grandpa owns about a dozen buildings in our downtown and is really responsible for the revitalization of our downtown. My uncle sits on the city council and he and my aunt own about 6 buildings downtown.

When Jus and I started reconsidering the location of our wedding the possibility of having our wedding in our hometown came up. We were kind of mixed. Neither of us is an active member at a church and most of the wedding venues in this area are a little over used. But then we remembered one of the buildings my grandpa owns.

The first floor of the building is home to a meat shop and the second floor is one huge room that totals 2300 square feet. Neither Jus nor I had been to this building in a couple of months but we remembered it as a possibility.

You enter through a door on the side of the building

into a little lobby area that will be cleared out.

The second floor has two walls of windows, a wooden herringbone floor, dark wood trim, and the original tin ceiling. We swung by the space with my parents and within five minutes of being there we had decided to use the space for our reception.

(I don't know why it looks like it was snowing inside)

I know what you're thinking. It didn't look anything like a wedding venue.

Since January my grandpa, uncle & Jus have sanded & varnished the floors, repainted the trim & the walls, redone & painted the ceiling, and did everything else to make the space look like this.