Planning to sue wedding venue. Do we have a case?

Hello everyone. I’ll try to keep this as brief as possible if I can. My wife and I got married a couple weeks ago on June 24th. We rented a wedding venue from an older retired couple. We were to get married outside on their big gazebo and then have our reception inside a big reception hall building. We paid for two days. The day before the wedding and the day of. We spent the day before the wedding setting up most of everything inside the reception hall. For example, tables, chairs, silverware, plates, signs, decorations, etc. I would say we got about 75% of everything setup that day and still had some finishing touches left for the day of wedding. Since it didn’t start until 5:30 pm, we had plenty of time.

The day of the wedding we head over to the venue around 6:30 am. We text the owners to let them know and they inform us that they lost power due to a storm the night before. Obviously we’re freaking out because we have no idea if we can have enough time to set the rest of our decorations up and hopefully still have power in time for the wedding. Well, through all the hoping and praying, the power never came back on for our wedding day. The entire morning, day and night, we had no power. We were trying to set things up in the dark the best we could. Obviously it was uncomfortable because there was no A/C and no lights while trying to setup. The owners offered no help whatsoever and in fact, because the storm had blown through the night before, they made US clean off their gazebo from
the flowers and dirt and water that made its way on there. Even though we didn’t cause the mess ourselves, they said since we paid for this time, it was our responsibility.

I was trying to keep my soon to be bride as calm as possible so me and a couple buddies went ahead and cleaned their gazebo in the event that we could even still get married outside. My bride was not able to get ready on site inside the bridal suite because once again, no lights or A/C. Our cake was all but ruined because the fridge stopped working. We had to spend hundreds of dollars on more candles to try our best and light up the reception hall. Overall, it was a very uncomfortable experience for our friends and family.

We ended up getting married inside the reception hall because it was still raining outside and even though the reception hall had no power, it was obviously the better option of the two. Not many people stayed for the reception due to the conditions. There was no dancing, speeches or really anything other than people trying their best to eat in a very dark reception hall. After it was all over, we spent most of the night cleaning in the dark so we could get back our $250 cleaning deposit. We got most of it done that night and came back the next morning to finish up the rest. We did. We cleaned everything spotless in that place. Luckily we got our deposit back in cash that day.

fter we sent them an email stating that we wanted half of the money back that we paid for a venue that was not delivered as promised, they said they would only give us $300 back and that the cleaning deposit would also count as an additional $250 because they stated we should have never gotten it back. They said that because one guest smoked outside in a non designated smoking area (even though they have zero no smoking signs up) and because they also found an empty beer can outside in the parking lot, they should have never given us the money back. Ok, well then why did you give it back in the first place??? When they handed me the money back, that to me was them agreeing we did everything we were supposed to.

Sorry for the rambling but we are planning on taking them to small claims and wanted to get opinions from different people. So far our family and friends all say we should and would win in court but of course they’re biased. We would like to get unbiased opinions on this. Also, nowhere in the contract does it state anything about acts of god or anything about them not being liable if the venue loses power. The contract just states things about what we are promised to get in our wedding package and about the cleaning deposit.

Thanks for your time if you read this. Ask any questions if you have any.