My Wedding Report

It is so important to be able to step back and ask for help when we need it. It is what will keep us sane in life and from going on overload. (This is my inner therapist talking, it is a whole different ballgame taking my own advice) This same concept of asking for help applies to wedding planning. Since I already shared with you about my amazing coordinator, I want to fill you in on why I thought it was so important to find someone to help with that day.

I love event planning. I’ve been doing it for years and Mark has as well. Before deciding to become a therapist I thought seriously about wedding planning. I couldn’t wait to plan my own wedding if for no other reason than I would get to plan a major event and all its details. However, I knew that I without question wanted a day of coordinator.

Why is this? Experience. Two years ago Mark and I helped plan our best friends’ wedding. It was a backyard wedding in Malibu and it was beautiful! The wedding reflected them as couple with Beatles ceremony music, Sprinkles cupcakes, DIY centerpieces and floral and trivia during dinner. I was a bridesmaid and the stand-in wedding planner and I don’t think I sat down once that day. I didn’t get a chance to soak in all our hard work or catch up with out of town friends. Even if something wasn’t going on I was anticipating the next moment I would be needed or a vendor was coming to ask me one question or another. Now this was totally okay. They were on a $10,000 budget and I loved being able to give that gift to my friend. However, I learned that you can’t do it all as the bride and if one of your guests does it they won’t be able to truly relax and enjoy the celebration.

I’ve heard similar experiences from friends and stress falling onto mother of the bride, bridesmaid or some willing friend. No matter how organized and on top of it you are, the day will be hectic and things will need to be taken care of.

I’m also a perfectionist (hey I admit it) and have a hard time just trusting someone random to take care of all the details and things I care about. I’m this way for group projects in school, planning events and probably even more so for my wedding. I knew that in order to FULLY let go of the control and trust another person to handle all the details I would need a professional that I trusted. Thus I found Courtney from Joyful Weddings and Events. If for some reason I couldn’t plan any part of my wedding I would without question have picked Courtney to do it for me. I trust her taste, abilities and talent, which means I will gladly hand the details over for the wedding when the time comes.

I ended up choosing the month-of package with Courtney after meeting with her. Courtney helps me create the time line for the wedding, contacts all my vendors for arrival time and last minute details, does a final walk-though with me at the site, gives vendor referrals and I can email or call her with any questions along the way. What a relief!

Do you absolutely have to hire a day of coordinator or planner etc? No. I know that it can be way out of budget for people and I think its a personal choice. You have to look at yourself and the people around you and evaluate what is best. For me personally, I knew that I would be much more relaxed and happier being able to hand the details off or I would not let go and worry all day. My mom is the same way and I didn’t want that to happen for the wedding. For me and our budget, finding someone to help was a major priority and I was willing to sacrifice other things.

If you are on a budget and there isn’t money, I absolutely believe that there are people who are more than willing to step up to the plate. As with all things there are so many untapped resources in your immediate network, you just have to ask. Just make sure you are as organized as possible and that duties are clearly assigned. (In the wedding that I was in this was not the case; plus some unexpected events such as the groom forgetting the rings led to more chaos…)

All Photos from The Knot

What about you? What was your thought process in whether or not to hire a day-of coordinator or even full wedding planner? Do you have a hard time asking for help and giving up control like me?

P.S. I think I need to devote a full recap to the wedding in Malibu. Just imagine lost rings, loose dogs, Sprinkles cupcakes, candlelight and Europe’s The Final Countdown playing in the background.

Are you tired of all these “Searching” posts? Well maybe it is a glimpse of how we were feeling that weekend. We were all tired and starting to wonder when we would find what we loved. There were locations we liked, but something did not seem right in one way or another.

So our last location to check out that weekend was the Estancia La Jolla. The hotel is on the Torrey Pines Golf Course which is right by the coast and also home to the Lodge at Torrey Pines and the Del Mar Hilton, which are 2 other beautiful locations (out of our budget). When we drove up the Estancia it was basically love at first site. We loved everything about the place. It had its own unique rustic feel, a gorgeous ceremony site, didn’t feel touristy and we liked the ballroom. We basically were ready to declare it “the one.” It seemed from the menu pricing we could even squeeze it into our budget. However, after talking to the catering manager the next day we discovered the minimum was way higher than we thought. Even if we did the event on a Friday or Sunday it would be a stretch to meet the food and beverage minimum. We were sooo sad!!! We tried negotiating something to work out but it just was not destined to be. However, I’ll share with you some pictures from the location.

Photos from Here Comes the Guide

Photo from Jules Bianchi

So the Estancia La Jolla was not meant to be, that’s okay I still recommend it for anyone that is looking for an awesome location. After moving on from the Estancia La Jolla I continued onward in my venue search. Don’t worry…pretty quickly after I found the perfect location and I can’t wait to share it with you!

I wanted to go through some helpful questions that helped us narrow down our venues and get important information:

• What are your minimums for events? Is it different for different days of the week?
• May I see your catering menu?
• Do you have a fee for the location on top of catering costs?
• Do you have facilities for the wedding party to get ready in?
• Can I bring in my own vendors? Do you have any limitations?
• Is there handicap access for elderly guests?
• How much does it cost to upgrade linens & chairs?
• What parking is available for our guests? valet? costs? (We were quoted $30 a car at one location!)
• How many weddings do you do in a day?
• How long do we have the venue for? When can we start set up? When do we have to be cleaned up by?
• Do you offer hotel block discounts for wedding guests?

I hope that these few posts have been helpful. I took a lot of time to research ahead of time, but then some of it came down to actually going to the place and seeing it in person.

Alright so continuing on the journey of finding our perfect location from where I left off. ( Be sure to read Part I if you haven’t already.)

Mr. Ducky, my parents and I were touring all over San Diego to find our ideal location for the wedding. It was becoming a little frustrating, but we kept going in the hopes that our search would come to an end. (Note: I would not take everyone on this “outing” if I were to do it again. It started becoming a little stressful with so many opinions)

The Crossings Carlsbad
Another location we really liked was The Crossings Carlsbad. It’s a newer location site in San Diego is actually the clubhouse for a public golf course. Their pricing is super reasonable and they have some great packages. While our group would fit, it would be a tight squeeze and we would have to seat some of our guests in separate room connected to the main reception area. Because we didn’t want to have to “separate” a portion of our guests we had to keep looking. (Photos are from their website)

Inn at Rancho Santa Fe
Inn at Rancho Santa Fe is another beautiful location in San Diego. A few years ago some close friends got married here and I loved it. It’s kind of quaint and just really personal. As a personal preference Mr. Ducky really wanted an indoor reception. They have a ballroom, but it is on the smaller size and would not fit a group of our size. So that is our main reasoning for not choosing this location. Also, I have some friends/acquaintances that are getting married here in the next year and for a few of my guests I’d be the 3rd/4th wedding of the year in this location and I thought that was weird. They have a beautiful outdoor reception area and if you are looking for more of a garden wedding I’d recommend looking here. There is big tree that many of the ceremonies take place under and the surroundings are so sweet. I think it is also important to note that the catering managers here seem really great to work with.




Photos from The Knot

The Prado Balboa
The Prado in Balboa, was a little further south in San Diego than we originally wanted. However, weddings there looked so beautiful in the pictures that I just had to look. I really liked that the ballroom was unique and didn’t look like a standard hotel ballroom. When we arrived the location was filled with people and despite the beautiful pictures it did not seem at all private. Above the ceremony location is a restaurant where people would be sitting which took away from the beauty of it. Also, they do several weddings a day here and are on a pretty tight schedule of cycling them through. I really did not like this idea of packing them in (although I am sure it is efficient) so we crossed this location off our list. But you can see in the pictures how pretty it is.

Pictures from Here Comes the Guide

Coming next: Part III and the location that we thought was “the one”

The choice of your ceremony and location is a big decision. It is where a large part of the budget goes and will help set the atmosphere for guests. Your location can be really formal or traditional, really casual and laid back or somewhere in between.

After I finished summer school last year our big thing on the “to do list” was to set the ceremony and location. We knew we wanted to get married in San Diego and I began to research.

Here is some of the criteria we started with:

• Able to accommodate 225-250 people
• Ceremony and Reception at the same location: We did not want our guests to have to drive in between or worry about people getting lost. In Mr. Ducky and I’s experience it is really nice when it’s a “one stop shop.” We also have elderly guests and wanted to make travel as easy as possible
• The place did not require us to use their pastors or pay extra to use their own officiant
• We preferred an outdoor ceremony
• Somewhere coastal would be wonderful
• Not too far south in San Diego as we had a lot of guests coming in just for the day from Orange County and LA (This made it difficult as many of the gorgeous locations in San Diego are further south in Mission Bay, downtown and Coronado)
• Not your usual big conference room: Mr. Ducky and I have done a lot of event planning and wanted to something kind of different that had the “energy” and charm.
• Affordable!

Before we even visited a location I basically investigated every venue in San Diego. (So if you are considering San Diego please let me know because I have a lot of information!) A tough point was the size of our group. A lot of the smaller and more unique locations had max. capacities of 180 or lower. San Diego is an expensive area to get married in and I found that some of my favorite locations were going to exceed our budget. However, one weekend Mr. Ducky, my parents and I went out to go look at some locations in person that seemed promising. I didn’t take pictures myself (I know I’m horrible and forgot my camera) but I was able to find some pictures with research.

Disclaimer: I wrote some mini reviews about our experiences and opinions about the different sites. Please only take them as that and that they may not fit your own opinions about these locations. While each site is wonderful, they did not quite fit what we working for and I tried to describe why in the summaries below.

La Costa Resort and Spa

Picture from Here Comes the Guide

Picture from The Wedding Compass
For those of you that aren’t familiar with La Costa Resort and Spa it is a luxury resort in San Diego and is basically a mini city. I had not realized how much it had grown since I was last there. There were a couple of things at La Costa that did not work for us. First, their regular ceremony site did not seem as wonderful as the rest of the resort. It was pretty small in between hotel rooms and there was a road in the back. They said there would be no cars on it, but I thought the black asphalt still looked odd. There is the orchid terrace for ceremony sites that overlooks the golf course, but it cost quite a bit extra and wasn’t really above and beyond our expectations to pay for that. There was one ballroom that would accommodate our group size and it was nice, but they couldn’t turn the lights on so we didn’t get the best look. The big thing that made us decide against it was how “touristy” it was. Mark did not want to have a bunch or random hotel guests onlooking or our guests having to go through the busy shop areas to get to the ceremony and location sites. I think we decided that after this location, something a little more private was important. If you want to see more pictures here is a slide show I found from the Wedding Compass.

La Jolla Woman’s Club


La Jolla Woman’s Club is a great venue down in La Jolla near the ocean that was very affordable. It is actually a historical site so it’s a little older but has a lot of charm. (My Aunt and Uncles wedding reception was here and according to my parents it still looks the same!) You can bring in catering, rentals everything. We like the site but the main problem was it would be a real tight squeeze to fit our group. We’d have to have the ceremony on the front lawn (as opposed to the side garden where smaller ceremonies take place) which was right next to a busy street where people were walking. The cocktail hour would be split in two locations and even the reception would be tight. If you are having a smaller wedding and want a simple charming location to bring all your own vendors to, I recommend you check this out.

Four Seasons Aviara



Photos from Here Comes the Guide

Photo from Jennifer Dery Photography

This venue was beautiful, especially the ceremony site! It was simply too expensive. One of the assistants showed us around and told us to plan on spending $200-250 per person on food and beverage alone. This did not include a crazy expensive minimum for a Saturday night event. Also, the assistant that showed us around was kind of “snobby” but the main director I talked to before seemed much nicer. If you have a big budget I recommend it. It’s a little more formal and traditional but very pretty. All of the pictures I have seen from weddings here turn out beautifully!!

So based on these few locations our “criteria” was changing. We wanted something more private that was sheltered from public onlookers and hotel guests. An indoor reception area was a “must” so that we would not have to worry about Mark or our guests overheating during the summer. Also, we wanted to find a location with a great staff that we felt like would be enjoyable to work with.

So stay tuned for Part II…

What do you think so far? Did you find your criteria changing as you looked at different sites?