*Backyard Wedding*

Here is something from Pinterest. You can look there for some more info and ideas.

https://craftsyhacks.com/backyard-wedding-ideas/

You can check pinterest. a nice tent might be nice and u could do some displays with wrapped sandwiches and desserts

Take a look at Pinterest. Make a list of top 3-5 most important things to you and skip the rest. Have a restaurant cater to save money.

My sister-in-law had a backyard wedding with approximately fifty guests. Based on her experience, they are not any cheaper and are a lot more stressful because are now responsible for everything that a venue would normally provide.

Food

My sister-in-law still hired a caterer. Her wedding was buffet style, but with the pandemic I would highly advise against any type of buffet. A lot of venues aren't even offering buffets or stations as options right now because of sanitary issues and social distancing. I will also add that some of my sister-in-law's apps that were supposed to be served during cocktail hour didn't get served because she forgot about them. My mother-in-law made some desserts that also didn't get served because it started down-pouring and guests started leaving early.

Parking

Parking is a huge issue. I saw a bride post a few days ago about how her experience was with her backyard wedding. Her neighbors complained and threatened to call the cops because people were parking in front of their house. She had to ask her guests to move their vehicles. Parking was so limited that some of her guests just decided to leave. For my sister-in-law's wedding people were forced to park blocks away and walk because there was limited parking at her house.

Bathrooms

My sister-in-law choose not to rent portable bathrooms for her wedding and she only has one bathroom in her house. That meant fifty people had to share one bathroom. It also meant if someone had to use the bathroom they had to walk through her house to get to the bathroom. It was not fun because there were guests who weren't very patient. I'm guess it was also a mess to clean up after the wedding.

Social Distancing

Unless you have an extremely large back yard, social distancing is going to be very difficult to achieve. Guests may not be comfortable being too close to one another so maintaining social distancing would be very important.

Bad Weather

You will need a backup plan in case of bad weather. As I previously mentioned, on my sister-in-law's wedding day it down-poured during the reception. She rented two rather large tents. One was set up in the drive which is where the dance floor and DJ were. Because of the rain, she only had her first dance with her husband, his dance with his mom, and her dance with her mom (she is estranged from her dad/my father-in-law). The tent didn't do a very good job protecting the dance floor so it was like a slip and slide and would've been way too dangerous for guests to dance on. The other tent was set up in part of her yard which is where she had all of her tables and chairs set up. It was very crowded and everyone had to run to get under the tent when it started to rain. It also didn't do a very good job of keeping people protected because of how strong the rain was. She ended up ruining her dress because chairs were still set up in the rain and she didn't want them to get ruined since she had rented them.

Rentals

There are a ton of items you will need to rent in order to have a successful wedding. Two majors ones I've already mentioned are tents and portable bathrooms. Tents are insanely expensive. You will also need tables and chairs. You will need chairs for the ceremony and possibly chairs for the reception unless you plan on using the same chairs which would mean that someone would be required to move the chairs where they are set up for the ceremony to the reception area. If you are taking photos during cocktail hour, you won't be able to move the chairs yourself so you'd have to rely on someone else to move them. You will need to make sure you have enough chairs for everyone as well. This was a major problem at my sister-in-law's wedding. She didn't have enough chairs for the ceremony nor did she reserve seats for immediate family so her three brothers (one is my husband), her brother's wife, and I all sat on a blanket in the grass at the very back of the ceremony because there weren't enough chairs and everyone was already seated by the time we were allowed to sit. She had done some family photos with all of us ahead of time so we didn't have the option to sit down any earlier. You will also need microphones during the ceremony so that your guests can hear everything that's being said. My sister-in-law didn't rent microphones for her wedding and we could barely hear her since we had to sit at the back of the ceremony.

Insurance and Permits

You may need to purchase special insurance to host your wedding at your home. While you might believe that nothing bad could happen, you will definitely want to be covered if something were in fact to go wrong. You don't want to expose yourself to problems. You might also need special permits. There could be fire regulations, noise ordinances, health department regulations, and zoning codes that you don't want to violate because you could have the cops called on you.

I did a backyard wedding in SoCal on June 20th. We invited 40 and needed up have 35 people which included our bridal party. I put families together in tables and socially distanced the tables. I also social distanced the seating during the ceremony. We had the wedding at a friends backyard and they were gracious enough to get additional home owners insurance for the day. We saved a ton of money on food; since we were the first event since the Covid shut down I was able to get this awesome brick oven pizza guy to make gourmet pizzas onsite. Everyone raves about it. We also saved on alcohol as we bought ourselves from Total Wine and More and had it delivered. We hired a bartender and it was cheaper than I thought it would be.


We had always planned to have a small wedding, even pre-Covid, and it was everything we wanted!! Here’s some pics of how I had it set up:

I got married in my parent’s backyard on June 27. We were originally going to do the whole big shebang with the fancy venue, band, etc. I realized in April that this was not going away and if I was going to move forward with my plans it was my responsibility to make sure I could make it as safe as possible. We cut the list to just family and close friends, and had the whole thing outside. People entered the house only to get food and use the restroom, which was luckily right by the back door. I requested that everyone wear a mask in the house and they did. We provided everyone with sanitizer and sat people with their households at tables for the ceremony and reception. Since we called it so early, we had time to do some real work on the yard and make it beautiful. My dad built a gorgeous arbor for us to get married under. We added a lot of lights to jazz things up and that made all the difference! We did get lucky with the weather, it was a beautiful day and not too hot (I live in TN so it was always going to be some kind of hot 😜). We went around and talked to all the neighbors the week before to give them a heads up about what was going on, and to ask for 30 mins of quiet time (no yard work, power tool use etc) during our ceremony. People were so sweet and just happy for us and we didn’t have a problem. I would highly suggest letting your neighbors know your plan in advance. Our next door neighbor who we are good friends with offered to let us use his driveway for the bar (right by the back gate so was very close), so that was even better in terms of spacing people out. We have a big deck that we used for the dancing. For the music, we just hooked a phone up to a speaker system and used a play list and it worked great. It was so special to get married at the house where I grew up and where my husband and I spent a lot of time as kids and teenagers. Looking back now, it was much more our style and I loved every minute of it.