Things that went wrong

We didn't get any wedding cake. I don't know where we were when it was being served, probably either dancing or taking pictures or something, but by the time I tracked down our Event Captain, he said it was all gone. And they never left any for us on our sweetheart table. We had been looking forward to that cake for months! So I was sure to share that feedback with our venue. Other than that, we got really lucky; our vendors nailed everything and generally exceeded all our expectations. I hope you still had a wonderful day overall and can look back on it with happy memories!

We aren't married yet, but the only thing that hasn't gone to plan was our cake baker. We wanted to use someone local since her prices were more reasonable for a 2 tier cake, but since our venue is about 2 hours away from our hometown, her travel fee would've been just as much as the cake lol. So we had to find someone a bit closer to our venue, which is fine!

I know one wedding I went to that was adults only and someone still brought their baby and they screamed the entire ceremony. The parent didn't even practice common curtesy and step out of the ceremony area....That's one of my fears of letting our family bring their children. FH's brother and his wife are having to foster her two baby nephews, and we're worried she'll want to bring them to our wedding instead of finding a sitter.

Another wedding we went to, the cake fell literally minutes before the reception was supposed to start. The MOB went to go tell her and the bride looked at her and said: If it's fixable, fix it and tell me later lol. I don't want to know. So they ended up saving the last tier and using the extra sheet cakes as the backup cake lol.

1. did not plan enough time for photography. in hindsight i feel like i should have dedicated a lot more time to it.

2. our ceremony chair vendors suddenly couldn't pick the chairs up! so it was supposed to be drop the chairs off and then pick them up same day. they called saying they couldn't and we were like uh well then we can't be held liable for what may happen to them because it's an outdoors venue we had to ask to leave there for the next day when the vendor could pick it up.

3. my reception venue was kind of annoying to my DOC about where to put stuff - they didn't let him put stuff where i had wanted but that didn't bother me as much since everything still looked nice [who cares if the candy table was on this wall instead of the other wall, etc right?]

The three major things that went wrong.

We specifically told our venue we didn't want to do a champagne toast, but they still had us do one anyways. We had alcohol at our wedding, but we went to great lengths to make sure my dad who is a recovering alcoholic wouldn't be close to anyone drinking alcohol. We sat him with guests we knew wouldn't be drinking and he planned on only staying for part of the reception because he didn't want to be around a bunch of people drinking. My brother was kept a close eye on him to make sure he didn't go anywhere near the bar. We had told everyone including my dad in advance there wouldn't be a champagne toast so he drank it thinking it was sparkling cider since there wasn't supposed to be a champagne toast. Of course, we were all upset because we tried so hard to make sure nothing like this would happen. The venue was very sorry, but I was about in tears. Thankfully, my husband was able to calm me down. The bar was closed during dinner per the venue's standard practice so we asked them to leave it shut down until my dad left. He left about 30 minutes after dinner so it wasn't a huge deal. I was just really upset and felt horrible because I didn't want our wedding jeopardizing my dad's recovery.

My wedding was four hours from where I live and 1.5-2 hours from where most of my guests live so the night of the rehearsal I shared a hotel room with my grandparents since I didn't want to stay with my husband the night before and my grandparents booked a room with two beds just in case anyone in our family would need somewhere to stay. It was a huge mistake. My grandmother was overly worried about me waking my grandfather so in the morning she rushed us with all of my things out of the room. In the rush, my jewelry got misplaced. It had been with everything in our room, but I was so thrown off by needing to grab everything that I didn't think about where it got placed. As a result, my mom and bridesmaids spent about 30-45 minutes searching for it. They ended up finding it, but it cut into picture time since we did bridesmaids/bride's man photos in advance so we didn't get as many photos of me with my people as I would've liked.

My florist I should've fired or never hired like my husband suggested. He didn't think she was a good fit from the very beginning, but I tried convincing him otherwise. She was the florist for my brother's wedding four months before us and she did an amazing job. However, she didn't do an amazing job for our wedding. About two months before our wedding, I was ready to fire her after she completely forgot we had a meeting scheduled and I sat outside waiting for her to arrive for over an hour. She claimed she would be back soon and she was so sorry. She ended up messaging me hours later that she ran into an issue and couldn't meet with me so we rescheduled for the next day. At that meeting, I learned she purchased items for our wedding without asking me in advance then expected me to pay the full purchase price because she claimed I was the only bride ever going to use those items. I disagreed and her husband actually ended up telling her it was more reasonable to charge us a rental fee because she could definitely reuse the items in the future. My husband thought finding a florist two months before our wedding was too short of notice so I didn't fire her. On the day of the wedding, my sister saw her broke down on the side of the road so that wasn't a good sign. She never even reached out to let us know there was possibly an issue which I thought was unprofessional. She ended up arriving late due to being stuck on the side of the road. When she did arrive, she brought of the wrong color roses but it was too late to get the right color. She used plastic flower holders that I previously told her I didn't like because she claimed she didn't know how to wrap the stems which I knew wasn't true because she wrapped the stems perfectly for my brother's wedding. She had never used the plastic flower holders before so our bouquets were falling apart. My husband's sister and his brother's wife used glue to glue my real flowers into place within the holder. They didn't have time to glue any of bridesmaids/groomswoman's bouquets so one of my bridesmaid's bouquet had flowers falling out of it during the ceremony and the groomswoman's bouquet completely fell apart during photos. She also forgot the pin we gave her in advance that was supposed to go on my bouquet that was my something borrowed so my SIL gave me her earrings to use as my something borrowed. She was supposed to use sparkly silver ribbon around the centerpiece vases, but she failed to do so. It was truly a nightmare.

The morning of our ceremony, our venue tried to say that we didn’t pay for ceremony chairs so they didn’t have chairs outside for our guests. I tried really hard to stay calm about it, but I was pissed. They rectified it and had staff bring out banquet chairs for our guests, but it was still annoying. Also, our cake was supposed to be 3 square with the tiers on diagonal from each other. They ended up being just straight tiers. In the grand scheme of things, no big deal, but in the moment I was really upset because we didn’t get what we paid for and I had spent a lot of time designing our cake with our baker exactly how I wanted it.

The transportation company that we used for bridal party and to get the guests to and from the hotel was a nightmare. We had 3 scheduled pickups from the hotel: 2:30, 3:00, 3:30 for a 4:30 ceremony. We knew that only family that wasn't needed for pictures till later would be on the early shuttle. The driver refused to leave at 2:30 because there were only 2 people on the shuttle so then all of the shuttles times were off and some people weren't able to get a shuttle from the hotel. And then, we had booked return trips (plural) during the reception and during the after party. From what I can tell, the trips during the reception went fine (I don't actually know if anyone used them to be honest) but then it's midnight, people are ready to go home and we find out that the company was just sending one limo "for the bridal party". Which was not at all what we agreed to. It's partly our fault because we never got a contract so had no grounds to stand on since we had already paid the company. But I was LIVID that this guy was trying to pull one over on us and get more money to transport the rest of our guests home. It was such a frustrating night to an otherwise perfect day!

View Quoted Comment Yes absolutely! I know exactly how you feel about paying for things that you didn’t get! It’s just overall been frustrating that these wedding vendors and venues charge exorbitant amounts of money and can’t even produce. At certain points of the night I felt like it may have been better for us to have had some sort of backyard cookout lol. My guests didn’t even get dressing on their salads. The salads were nothing like what we ordered. And to top it off the salads were supposed to be gluten-free. They were loaded with croutons. That was just one of many issues with the entire dinner service

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That's crazy! How do you serve salads without dressing? We have so many family members that are gluten free so I would be livid if something we chose was supposed to be gluten free and got to my guests covered in croutons. I hope you leave a very detailed review on every possible website!

I was hoping you'd post how you're wedding went! I know you've had several stressors leading up to it from Covid tests to worrying about people taking pictures/videos and showing up late. I'm sorry your caterer didn't meet your expectations--that is so frustrating considering it's one of the biggest costs. We're you happy with other vendors: florist, photographer, baker?

View Quoted Comment Everything else was great, but the caterer was just awful.

The only thing that was wrong was we were married in an arboretum and there were no signs saying our names and which site we were at, but I had told people ahead of time so that helped. I wish we had servers for our buffet lunch as some people, well how can I say this - took three times the amount of food! We had to order more (luckily we were at a restaurant!) but looking back those people would have said "Yeah....give me three scoops!" so maybe it would not have mattered.

Our wedding did not have a lot of moving parts so that made it easier!

Hey! Hubby and I got married June 4th and it was honestly perfect! The only thing that went wrong was me and my bridal party arriving an hour late and the wedding starting and hour and a half later. I still had to get dressed at the venue and take my getting ready shots. The only good side to that was all of our guests also got stuck in the same traffic as us and were also late. So if we started on time I’m sure it would only be the wedding party in attendance. When we showed up so were guests. I greeted many of them as I entered the venue in my robe. The venue was so great. No one made us feel bad for being late. Every attendant and vendor had such a warm and kind spirit and treated us so beautifully. It touched my heart. That was the only thing that went wrong but in the end it worked out best because we got to have majority of our guests at the ceremony. It rained and thundered but the venue already had our ceremony moved indoors to their chapel and it was decorated like a magical romantic garden with soft purple uplighting and twinkling lights. Way better than the real outdoor garden they had.
I didn’t get to eat however, and that is totally my fault. During alterations I completely forgot to make sure I could sit in my mermaid dress. I learned the day of the wedding I could not lol. Getting into a seat was a task so was getting up. Luckily I had a bridal attendant who waited on me hand and foot and I love her to death for it. I also had my girls and my husband constantly helping me up and back down. Because I couldn’t really bend in the dress I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t even reach my plate lol. Please be sure you can sit in your dress it’s so important!! Everything else was amazing. We had so much fear going into what our wedding would look like due to covid and the world being so unpredictable for so long and in the end it was a truly magical day.