When we decided to have our wedding on Maui, we didn’t want to leave anyone out of our celebration even though we wanted to have a very small intimate wedding. The best way for us to do that was to have another celebration once we returned home to Portland. We let everyone know that we would be doing this and then it sunk in how much extra work it was going to be.
Don’t get me wrong, we are happy to do it. In fact, we are really happy that we will still get a chance to celebrate with all of our friends, no matter how many there are, and with all of our families, no later how big they may be. We just hadn’t taken into account how much extra work it would be when planning our wedding to also plan a reception at home.
Once we decided to have another reception once we got back home we needed to figure where to have it. Since we’d already gone through the whole process of looking for venues when we were still considering having our wedding in Portland, we already knew what our options were. We also knew that what we would want also wouldn’t work in our budget. At least not a place that would hold everyone. Instead of selecting a venue, we decided to just have the celebration at our house, Knotty Cakes Ranch. That way we could take the money we would have spent on a venue to put it into the rest of our house restoration and the landscaping of our yard. We are also in the process of building a tiki bar that would not only provide us with additional space for our guests, but also the bar needed for our reception.
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| Damn, Knotty Cakes Ranch looks sad in this picture! Wait until you see all of the progress we've made. We never would have decided to have our Portland celebration at home if it still looked like this. {source} |
Deciding to have our Portland reception at home opened up a whole new realm of possibilities when it came to food, drink, decorations and vendors. We weren’t locked into any place's restrictions or were we being forced to use certain vendors. We were able to pick exactly what we wanted. Since we are both complete food and drink snobs deciding to have the reception at our home really worked well for us. It meant we had the freedom to do exactly what we wanted and to create the exact feel that we wanted.
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| Oh, the food and drink possibilities! {source} |
Of course, we decided to carry over our wedding theme, old Hawaii and our wedding colors, tropical red and aquamarine into our reception at home. All with a little backyard DIY twist. There will be vintage elements throughout to reflect our Hawaiian travels and to bring the islands to our friends and family back home. As well as a touch of that good ol' Portland spirit.
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| A little Portland reception inspiration. {source} |
We have a whole other to do list going for our Portland wedding celebration. There’s a guest list to finalize, save the dates and invitations to be made, a house and yard to be finished, a food and drink menu to be finalized, desserts to taste, activities to plan and so much to make. Luckily we have a tight supportive group around us to help us pull all of this together and to make our reception at home an unforgettable celebration. Make sure to watch here as it all unfolds!
Are you having more than one wedding reception? Did you realize how much more additional work it would be before you decided to have one? If you have known it was going to be so much work, would you have still decided to have a second reception?
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