Wedding Locales are in Abundance!

If you’re a bride that’s getting married in Austin, the possibilities for a wedding venue are almost boundless. The area is so ripe with vegetation and breathtaking scenes of the Hill Country that this area is known for that it’s almost impossible to pick a place. That is, if there’s not a limit on your budget….

Unfortunately for this Austin gal, there is a budget, and I REALLY want to adhere to that budget as much as possible. Yes, I want a really cool, beautifully elegant wedding that I will remember through awesome photographs for the remainder of my days, but I don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for that to happen. There are too many other things to spend my $$ on these days, especially these days.

It’s been a big dilemma for me, to be perfectly honest. Spending $10K, $15K, or more on a ceremony and party that will last only ONE day…but it’s what I want, and since it’s me paying for it, then why not? As long as future intended is on the same boat, and he is.

So back to picking a venue. I started my search months and months ago. Yes, ladies, I started searching for the wedding venue LONG before I was actually engaged. You see, I knew that with our big project coming up at work, that my time around the actual engagement would be somewhat limited (Boy was a right about that one!) and I wouldn’t be able to fully focus on wedding-related details at that time. So, I went in the opposite order of things (since I knew it was coming, but not exactly when) and did some research ahead of time.

I found everything that you could imagine. From the ridiculously expensive to the cheapest of cheap wedding venues, and keeping an open mind to the possibilities, I looked at them all. And I started reading all the wedding magazines and books that give you budget guidelines and all, so that I could get a better grasp on what % of my budget should go for reception venue.

The good news is that we were both okay with an outdoor ceremony. So that meant that I was looking for a venue that could be both ceremony site and reception hall. The other factor that narrowed things down for us was the availability of a dance floor. My future husband and I want to enjoy our wedding, we want to have fun on the dance floor and several of our parents LOVE to country-western dance. So that limited things too, because if the venue didn’t have a dance floor already, then the price had to be lower to accommodate us renting a dance floor since that point was non-negotiable with my fiancé.

So without further ado…here are the two that my internet search got me down to:

www.texasoldtown.com
www.mercuryhall.com

Both venues have their good and bad points, which I’ll get into starting tomorrow. I have visited one site personally, with plans to visit the second site soon, and I’ll share my observations and such about each site tomorrow. In the mean time, feel free to check out the sites and do your own research!