With our vision and inspiration board in place, we were ready to start planning. The first step was choosing a wedding date. Because we wanted to keep costs as low as possible, we decided to get married on a Sunday and also keep our wedding to 75 guests or less. We were both very clear that we wanted immediate family and friends only. Because 80% of our guests would be coming from out of town we did not want to make our guests request more time off of work than absolutely necessary. As a result, we decided that we would either have a Memorial Day or Labor Day Sunday wedding since most people get the following Monday as a day off. We ultimately chose the Sunday before Memorial Day as our wedding date and used that date (5.25.08) as a theme that would carry through to all aspects of our wedding.
Choosing a venue was a simple decision for us. We knew with our limited budget that the many beautiful hotels, mansions, arboretums, ranches, and plantations in the Dallas area would be far outside of our budget. So, we chose the next best alternative…a country club with smaller fees and a low food and beverage minimum.
Hackberry Creek Country Club is a small, cost effective, and beautiful club with floor to ceiling windows overlooking the Las Colinas canals (the same canals where we were engaged). The club has a spacious ballroom and numerous other rooms perfect for both ceremonies and receptions. Since David is Jewish and I am Christian it was important that our venue doubled not only as our reception location but also as our ceremony location. Because our guest list was so small we were able to use one of Hackberry’s other rooms for the ceremony and the large ballroom with adjoining side room for the reception and cocktail hour.
The main ballroom
The adjoining side room
Next on our agenda was creating our invitations.