How To Transform Your Wedding Venue with Lighting | Wedding Q&A

Well, hello, lovely humans, and welcome to Engage, a wedding planning podcast for the modern-day couple. I'm your host, Jamie Wolfer, and I truly believe that wedding planning does not need to be complicated or time-consuming. I kind of picture these episodes like jumping on a quick phone call with your wedding planner. You get your answers and you go on your merry way, because sometimes not all of us have an hour to dedicate to listening to super long podcasts or super long intros. So without further ado, let's just jump right on into it. Today's episode is going to admittedly be a little bit all over the place. You see, every single month I sit down with the people over in the Master Plan course and answer your questions in lifetime. So if you find yourself struggling and really need to sit down and speak with a real-life wedding planner, I would love to be a part of your wedding planning journey. Join us over in the Master Plan today to get your questions answered. Until then, take a listen. Oh my goodness, Danielle, I would love to have a Prohibition meets dark academia vibes. Same. And I'm already married, but most venues in my location with that style have required caterers and/or would be stretching our budget beyond comfort. Budgets are stupid. I'm sorry. Any tips on how to inexpensively transform a white-walled blank space into a moody vibe? Ideally, I don't want to organize massive amounts of setup. I'm open to abandoning that vision as a vibe/theme is a 3 for both of us. Have you noticed any styles which work more seamlessly with the dull white community center-like locations? It has to be indoors as we're thinking February 2026 in Canada and definitely not rustic farm. I hear that. Okay. So a key thing for you is going to be lighting, lighting, lighting, lighting. I think in a situation like this, you can— I did a video called Transform Your Wedding Venue where we did a lot of pipe and drape. That can add some dimension, that can add some moodiness to it, but in some spaces it just feels like pipes with drapes on them. It doesn't feel like you're really transforming the space. So it depends on what your space actually looks like itself. I think that we accept it for what it is when it's white and it's bright. But as the evening goes on, we saturate that place with candles. Okay. So I'm thinking, um, if you can get any sort of lanterns in there, if you can get even just prayer candles, those are really, really affordable pillar candles. I found the most affordable ones across the board to this day still. IKEA. Don't get scented ones, get the unscented ones. But if you want a variety of pillar candles, those get really pricey when you start shopping around. Um, IKEA has the most affordable ones that I have found to date. So if you can draw the eye in as the night goes down, we're not using the big overhead lights. If you can get cafe bulbs, that's great. Um, I would go for some richer textures and/or colors, um, in your florals, potentially your napkin. Could you imagine some sort of— what could we do for like a napkin? Like a burgundy or a dark green cheesecloth napkin, and those are positively useless. They're useless, but they're stunning, and sometimes that's all that matters. That's what I do— add in dark colors on the places that you can control. Make sure the lighting can get really dark, so see what lights have to be on. Sometimes they have like, um, safety lights that have to be on, etc. I'm not saying that we took the bulb out of one of ours at our wedding. I'm not saying that. I'm not. Don't tell anybody I said that. I don't think I've ever admitted that. I think I forgot until we're talking about it right now. Um, candles, because then as the evening goes on, it's gonna get Prohibition feeling, it's gonna get dark academia because it's like just moody warm lighting. I think that would be great. Hopefully that helps. Because you can't— and that's the situation with venues like this— you can't control what they look like when you— like, it's daylight outside, but you can absolutely control what it looks like when it gets dark. Sitting here listening to a podcast is all fine and dandy, right? But sometimes you need an actual person to be asking some of these questions to. And you may be sitting there going, you know what, Jamie, actually, yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. I would love to be able to ask you these questions. Guess what? You need to join the Master Plan. You've heard me talk about it, but do you know why I love it so much? You get over 10 lessons that walk you through planning your wedding with videos and spreadsheets and other detailed resources along the way. Join me and my virtual clients over in the master plan and get all your wedding planning questions answered. Literally thousands of couples have gone on this journey with me, and I'd love for you to be next. Check it out at wolferandco.com TMP. That's wolferandco.com TMP. Listen, wedding budgets suck. They're just like the actual worst. And the hardest part for me is that weddings are not cookie cutter. They're not one size fits all. And I think it's important to make sure that you're budgeting according to your priorities. Build a budget that works with your vision and you'll be on the path to planning a wedding that you really want. So if you want my recommendations for making your perfect budget for you and your partner, head on over to weddingpriorities.com. Valerie said, what are some unique alternatives to a traditional guest book? I know some trending options are phone message or Polaroid photos. I'm considering something that could be usable rather than collected Dust. What do you mean by usable? Because I would love to give you like a more catered response. Um, most of the time, in my opinion, if— in my opinion, the best yes book is a photo album of you two that people sign, and that looks like a gorgeous coffee table book. That's the best one in my opinion, because then you get the best of both worlds. You have something stunning with actual pictures of you guys, your engagement photos, you got them printed up. People have written in it, but it also appears pretty on the outside. A lot of guest books or unique alternatives to guest books have people writing on a globe or on the matting of one singular picture. And at a certain point, you don't want to display that anymore. At a certain point, everyone's signatures might look a little bit cluttered to you. And a lot— some people are like, I'm going to keep it up for the rest of my life. I don't care. A lot of couples I know, don't really want to display it anymore after a certain amount of time, uh, because it just feels irrelevant when you just had your third kid, right? It's cute, but it's gonna sit in the back of a closet and it's gonna collect dust. So the best, in my opinion, is to do something that has photos or something associated with a picture, a photo booth. So for us, we did a little Insta— like, um, what's— I was about to say the Polaroid, not Polaroid, you know the thing. Uh-huh. The Insta thing. We did that and had people— they could take photos of themselves and take a little photo with them, and then we asked them to put a photo in the book and then write something next to it. So we have a bunch of really silly photos that they just took themselves and put in there instead. So for that, it's actually ours is an old autograph book that I took all the pages out and put new pages in for people to sign. So that's really fun. That's my favorite way of doing this. I know after the tone, um, actually have not worked with them. I would love to see what their stuff is like and love to connect with them. I know a lot of people like that. Also, you know what I wish we could do? I wish we could bring back the video camera going around to different tables, asking people for their well wishes. You remember those? Or am I dating myself? I mean, I was little when it happened, but like someone going around being like, what words do you have for the happy couple? Like a big old camcorder on their shoulder style thing. Let's bring that back. So hopefully some of those ideas will be helpful for you, Valerie, because I know the signing of the little wood heart and like dropping into a frame, that's again, it's one of those that might not be as fun. The thumbprint on the tree might not be as fun in 5 years, you know, those sorts of things. So try to think about the longevity of some of this. I want it to be something that, you know, if you don't want it on your coffee table anymore, you could put on the bookshelf with the rest of your beautiful books and you're not going to regret having it. You're not going to feel bad about it sitting there because it's a book and that's its intended location. Yeah, my fiancé and I have found a venue we love and are just about ready to put a deposit down and sign the contract. Are there things we should look out for in the contract or things we need to ensure are in there? I don't know what I don't know and would appreciate your insight. Okay, so we have the 20 questions video, which hopefully you've already seen if you have already gone to this venue. If not, we'll go ahead and toss that link into the chat for you. There is a guide that you can download that might be helpful. And there's also a video about spotting bad, bad vendors before you book. That being said, to answer your question, my biggest concern when it comes to signing with a venue is what vendors can you bring in? Required versus preferred versus you can bring in whoever you want. Because, uh, and I just saw a TikTok recently of this gal who was like, I didn't realize, I mean, they had 3 caterers that I could pick from. I didn't realize how expensive those caterers gonna be and absolutely wrecked our budget. And I was like, Yep. So what I want to know is what requirements outside of what you're paying them do they require? So you should have a pretty clear idea of what you're going to pay them, uh, if they're offering catering or drinks. And there could be a little bit of differentiation. Maybe you won't know the bar total till the end of the evening, that kind of thing, or it's going to be adjusted once you find out your actual guest count. Sure, there could be some room for that kind of stuff. Um, you're going to want to look for service fee. Don't be surprised by that, that's normal. That's not a tip. That's not a gratuity charge. Um, admin hours, things like that. Those are also considered normal. Sometimes those surprise people, but I want to make sure that you're not signing up for a venue that requires you book a caterer that's $65 per person or $100 per person. Cause that at 100 people, if you weren't expecting that, can really skyrocket things for you. So if you've gone through and you've gone through the 20 questions, And then you've like gone through the video on how to spot a bad vendor before you book. Those, those would be my biggest concerns. And that's where people get into the biggest hot water. I'm going to step on my soapbox for a minute, if you'll allow me. This is where people get the most basically screwed when it comes to their budget. This is the most frequent place I see an issue is signing with a venue that takes up too much of their budget and/or requires them to use required vendors. And so you're just like, oh, I mean, the venue was like $10,000 of our $20,000, but that's fine because we have $10,000 left. And you find out you have to use their caterer. You have 100 people and it's $100 a person. And they're like, oh crud, there's our entire budget. So that's where I want to make sure— this is why we have a certain amount allocated in the master plan for how much you should spend on your venue. Okay, I'll step off my soapbox now. I hope I answered your question, Bella. She's like, yeah, and then some. You could chill. I didn't need a soapbox for that, but thank you. If you are struggling with wedding planning and you have questions and you just need someone to listen and to chat with, come join us in the Master Plan community over at themasterplanwed.com. I would love to have you in there. Thanks so much for listening. If you haven't done so already, subscribe, jump on over to wherever you're listening to this podcast and leave a 5-star review so we can let the podcast people know that Jamie knows what she's talking about sometimes. And until next time, bye guys.