Saturday, April 25, 2009

Waltzing Matilda...

Things have been quiet around here, I know. I haven't been doing much in the way of wedding stuff. We have a decent idea of what we want, and it's too soon to tell for most everything else. Everything is 'in progress', but not much progress is being made. We're still 15 months out from the wedding after all.

One thing has been bothering me though. Luke and I both love dancing, and have a decent amount of training. It's important to us to have dancing at our wedding. Not a long list of formal dances where he and I dance with everyone of the opposite gender from our families, ("...and now for the Mother of the bride's cousin and the groom...")

Our location (which we will book once we get a few questions answered) has an indoor space (the grange hall) and an outdoor space, which is basically field and forest. No manicured anything, not a lawn... not full of potholes, but not particularly flat either. (See this entry for a refresher on our location.

We initially wanted the whole thing (ceremony and reception) to be outside (barring weather complications) and so it didn't really matter to us that the grange was a bit...agricultural... All anyone but my 'staff' was going to see was the outside, which is a lovely shade of yellow anyways... But now that I am thinking more specifically about dancing, I'm thinking that in the grange hall might be the only place to do it! It's terribly obnoxious to dance on something that doesn't at least resemble a dance floor, and Luke and I want to show off!


The grange hall last November


Theoretically we could rent a dance floor, but they are expensive. The one quote we've seen on dance floors was nearly $300 fro 12'x12', which with a guest list of 300+ wouldn't really cut it if everyone wanted to dance. On the other hand, maybe everyone WON'T want to dance.

I just went to a wedding that had their reception at the Elks Club. It was lovely and all, and fit the couple wonderfully, but the pictures of old members staring down from the walls during the reception and the animal heads really killed it for me. Now I'm sure that the grange isn't as bad as that, but still I don't want to sacrifice the mood of my wedding, just because I'm snobby about dancing surfaces.

So it seems I have three options:
*Suck it up and rent a dance floor, even if it might be on the small side.
*Have dancing indoors, risking splitting the reception and adding a podunk feel to the party
*Have the dancing outdoors in the grass and just screw the whole dance floor thing, no one is going to care how well we dance anyways.

What do you guys think?