Location, Location, Location

So once we had finalized West Michigan as our location...that still left a lot of options. Did we want Holland, my home town? Grand Rapids, the nearest city? Somewhere in between?

Ultimately the decision came down to: where could we get married AND have the reception?

Turns out, not very many places.

See, West Michigan is Religious. With a capital R. There are 170 churches in Holland alone, and Grand Rapids is the home of the Christian Reformed Church AND we kicked off the WWJD? bracelet trend.

So West Michigan likes its churches. A lot. So much so that it seems there isn't much demand for getting married outside of a church. Unless you're getting married at the beach, or at an outdoor gazebo. Two options that are soooooooooo not happening in February.

So in January, Billy and I treked across the state to spend a couple of days looking at a handful of locations that could, theoretically, handle hosting both parts of our ceremony.

Why did we look in January? Because my mom had convinced me that if someone was originally planning on getting married on Valentine's day and their preferred location was booked, they might consider moving the wedding back a weekend.

I was not going to let that happen to me! So I scoured, absolutely scoured every possible website I could find that even referenced doing indoor wedding ceremonies in West Michigan. We found...4. I believe. Again, I hadn't been planning on blogging every tiny detail of my wedding-planning-life at that point (I had only an inkling of how obsessed I was going to become!) so I didn't keep copious notes or take any pictures. Here are the places I remember looking at and rejecting:

Celebration Cinema: the Wave Room: Billy and I looooooooooooooove movies. Some people think going out to the movies is kind of a lame date: sure, you're sitting next to your sweetie for two hours, but you're just sitting there, staring at a screen in the dark. There's no interaction for that two hours.

Maybe we're un-romantic, but that's just fine with us. Billy and I are passionate about movies. He wants to write and/or direct for film (or TV. Or theatre. He's really not picky at this point) and I absolutely love studying film. So I had begun kicking around the idea of having a movie theme for the wedding (this was before I knew how popular it was as a theme. As someone who's usually totally non-traditional, I'm kind of kicking myself for this choice now. But it fits us so well I don't know what else I could possibly do!) and what better way to pull that in than by actually getting married at the movies!

Now, the website only mentions having space for wedding receptions, but some website or other that I checked out listed them as available for ceremonies as well, and when I called to make the appointment, the woman I spoke to assured me they had done ceremonies in the past and could definitely accommodate us.

When we pulled up to the theater, Billy wasn't so sure he was going to like it. Actually, he was pretty convinced as we walked in that he was going to hate it.

There's no private entrance (that we saw) for the Wave Room. There's no denying it: you're entering the main lobby of a big, modern cinemaplex. But really, I didn't see anything wrong with that. It was fun! It was us!

I really liked the Wave Room itself. It was really big with an entire wall of windows to catch any sort of sunlight we could get in February (or pretty pretty snowfall! That's what I'm hoping for: just enough to make it pretty, not a blizzard). Lots of space for a dance floor, and really cool food options (STATIONS! I hadn't heard of them before in my wedding research, but it sounded SO COOL!).

And then I asked where we would actually be getting married. I did not like the answer.

We could either have everyone sitting at their banquet tables as we got married (yuck) or have the room set up with a traditional style aisle and all of the chairs set out theatre style...and then banish all of our guests from the room for two hours while they re-set everything for the reception. What would our guests do during that time? "They could go see a movie!" (Yeah, because there are usually so many stellar films in February) "Or they could go eat. There's lots of restaurants here by the theater!"

Wait, seriously? You want me to drop thousands of dollars to feed 100+ people, and then encourage them to go get dinner on their own dime elsewhere?!

It didn't take long to cross the movie theater off of our list.

Crossroads Banquet and Conference Center: This is the place I wanted to cross off of our list as soon as we drove up. There are no pictures of the exterior anywhere to be found for good reason: it's a cinder block box. Maybe in the summer it was wonderful, lush grounds, but in January, it was a big gray box in the middle of a bunch of trampled down dirt.

So not appealing.

But inside it's pretty fantastic. They did a great sell for us. They had two distinct ballrooms for doing the ceremony in one place and then the reception in the other.It was really bright and cheerful inside (the sky in the lobby was painted with clouds!) and the bathrooms were fantabulous. A silly detail, I know, but it's something I noticed. They were also willing to cut us some deals because they were still a pretty new place and wanted to build up a customer base.

Oh, and they're affiliated with a Holiday Inn Express right next door that has a waterpark. Admission is included with your hotel room. That's pretty sweet.

The downsides: Aside from the outside appearance? Well, the dance floor was really small. I forget the exact dimensions but I'm pretty sure I blurted out "That's it?" when I saw the tiny slab of parquet off in one corner. If you don't plan on dancing at your wedding, this place would be fabulous, but we're big on dancing, so we knew this place probably wasn't for us. Plus it was a little bit in the middle of nowhere. Fairly close to the airport for our guests who would be flying in, but that's about the only thing it seemed close to. I'm not the biggest expert on Grand Rapids, so for all I know there were a million attractions right over the next hill, but as we were driving out to it I kept feeling like I must have missed it because there was just nothing out there.

DeVos Place: When I first told my mom that we were thinking about getting married over in her neck of the woods, the first place she looked up was The Amway Grand, which is the luxury hotel over in Grand Rapids.

Which is definitely reflected in the price.

So I was hesitant to check out DeVos Place, which is the convention center connected to the Grand. But I was very surprised to see that the place was downright cheap in comparison, and probably wouldn't have cost us much more overall than the place we ended up with.

The event coordinator at DeVos was wonderful, she gave us a full tour of all of our options, changing course as we explained more and more about what we were thinking, telling her what we did or didn't like about the rooms she was showing us. A great salesperson (I feel absolutely terrible for forgetting her name! But this was also almost 8 months ago, so I really shouldn't feel too bad), with a really creative mind. Her brain was constantly clicking along, proposing creative ideas for how we could pull off the ceremony and reception in a limited amount of space. They actually have experience doing receptions and ceremonies, something the other sites we'd visited had lacked. Crossroads had the space, but being so new they didn't really have the experience.

Ultimately, the only real reason we opted to go with some place else was a boat show was already booked for our desired date. They were wide open the next weekend, and if we really, really wanted to we could have figured out a way to make the 21st work...but it just wasn't meant to be.

If you're getting married in the Grand Rapids area, I would highly recommend checking out DeVos place for a very modern ceremony and/or reception.

Next post: Where did we end up going?