Part six of a seven part series of the ins and outs of planning and executing a decor heavy DIY wedding
Heather and David’s Granville Island wedding was one for the books! It was a one-of-a-kind logic puzzle where we had to choreograph every movement made by our team and the rest of the vendors, and the second that one thing didn’t go to plan, we had to adjust everything.
I think a big part of the reason that more difficulty didn’t pop up for this wedding was because I held a production meeting with my leads following my details meeting with Heather. We don’t usually have production meetings because weddings don’t regularly require us to have so many people leading the charge. So a month before the big day, our team sat down over pizza and went through the details and instead of just having one brain (mine) get everything done, the three of us collaborated to create the most complete production schedule and plan we’ve ever seen.
Now usually, when creating timelines, I try to work with a fair bit of grace time built in. Only takes 20 minutes to drive to the venue from where you’re getting ready? Great, I’m having you leave 45 minutes before you’re set to arrive because someone is going to forget their phone up in the hotel room and not notice until just before they go to get into the car, then there’s an accident on the bridge that’s causing congestion, then your driver takes a wrong turn. Best case scenario, nothing goes wrong and you get to sit and catch your breath for 25 minutes of downtime. But there’s all sorts of things that can go wrong and as long as we budget in time frequently for those things, we’re sitting pretty. But this wedding was a little different.
With the intense amount of decor, we could spare no time in the set-up or tear-down for errors and if something went wrong we had to have a solution ready to go. And things did go wrong. The first thing that didn’t go quite to plan (but we did anticipate it a bit) was on my team, the Ladder team. We hung the first chandelier and after we moved onto the next zone, we realized that the chiffon wasn’t hung quite right. This was an issue because there were two pieces hung there and the furniture had already been placed. We couldn’t leave it less than perfect so we had to take the time to correct this. To compensate for this we stopped work in that zone (knowing we’d have to move the furniture), we completed the zone we were working on, had the floor team help briefly with moving the furniture in the first zone, and let them move onto the next zone. Because we were able to complete our work so much faster in each zone, thankfully it didn’t set the floor team back too much, and ate into maybe only 5 minutes of my own lunch break.
Another issue we encountered was the delivery of the linens. Of course, we couldn’t really get to work on the decor on each table without having each set of tables dressed with the table cloths, and we don’t want to start placing the chairs around the table until the table is set so that we don’t have to work around the chairs; however, the linens arrived about an hour after we had slotted them to arrive. Thankfully we had a bit of prep work that our floor team could do while they waited to set the tables, but it meant that while the ceremony was happening outside we had two team members inside doing the finishing touches that should have been done more than an hour before.
The final hitch in our giddyup came from questionable weather. Because of it, we weren’t sure the ceremony would be outside until about a half hour before the guests were expected to arrive. We had originally slotted an hour to get the ceremony set-up and we managed to complete the entire set-up in twenty minutes while still readying the couple and their attendants to walk the aisle.
There were a few other small hiccups in the day around the timing of the courses and how speeches were done, but we don’t need to divulge because at the end of the day, there was only so much we could do about those problems, and regardless the day ended up beautifully and we functioned generally on time which meant that very few people outside of our team knew anything was wrong, which is exactly what we want!
In two weeks, we will be diving into the FINAL part of this crazy 7 part wedding saga where we do a bit of review. See you there.
Our other awesome vendors included:
Photography: Amy Teixeria Photography
Florals: Our Little Flower Company
Big Chandelier rental: Art of the Party
Lounge area rental: Cahoots Creative
Chair Rentals: A & B Partytime Rental
Venue: Performance Works Granville Island
Check out the other posts in this series!