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We met with our day-of coordinator over the weekend, the lovely Vera Devera of Va de Vie Events and Canvas Underground.  I’m gushing about Vera because after our meeting, and based on our phone calls and emails, I am excited to get to know her.  She’s our kind of people, and I am thrilled we found someone who I think will make such a nice addition to our little party.

Now, you may be asking yourself, what is a bride on a budget doing with a coordinator?  Well, it’s like this.

Reason #1:  I want our friends and family to enjoy the wedding and not be running around town doing errands for us all weekend.  My idea for our wedding is a family vacation culminating in a beautiful day that we spend enjoying each others’ company and celebrating one of life’s happiest moments.  This is the opposite of a labor-intensive vision, which means that I need help from someone I am paying.

Reason #2: I also needed a little bit of help with the big picture.  You see, for the reception, Tony wants us to serve San Tung Chinese food at the rental house, where the kids can run around and we can all relax.  I was worried about this; I knew his vision of the reception was sitting on the sofa eating dry fried chicken wings out of the take-out container while our friends and family took turns playing Rock Band.  Think finger licking, take-out boxes strewn everywhere, and beers on the coffee table.

While I have no problem with this set up for our usual Rock Band nights with our friends, it was not exactly how I envisioned our wedding.  The reception I imagine has all of us gathered around candlelit dinner tables laughing, eating, and drinking with a musician strolling the tables.

To illustrate, from one of my favorite movies, About a Boy, I want this:

Not this:

I found Vera through her blog about her plans for her own budget wedding.  Vera’s blog also linked to her Canvas Underground dinner parties.  These are parties that take place in lofts and old Victorians throughout San Francisco.  She coordinates the food, desserts, drinks and entertainment at these house parties, which usually have between 40-60 people.  And she’s marrying a musician, so I figured she probably had a few connections to entertainers who might throw us a bone and do her a favor on a Monday night when they didn’t have anything better to do, anyway.

Photo of Canvas Underground event by Brittany Phiel.

This looked like a perfect fit for our needs.  Vera listened to our ideas, and our problems, and helped us come up with a real game plan.

Revision to the The Plan: We’re serving San Tung Chinese food, but Vera is bringing enough tables and chairs so that we can have a sit-down dinner served family style.  There won’t be any balancing of soggy plates filled with Chinese noodles and chicken wings on laps.  We’ll have actual entertainment before dinner.  We’ll have a seating chart, and a kid’s table, and pretty printed menus.  The teacups and chopsticks will be packaged together as pretty favors with their names at their place settings.  I get a little bit of elegance; Tony gets a relaxed party at the house.  We still have Chinese food, Rock Band, cupcakes and candy.

Yay for plans coming together!

Reason #3: We need someone who can run the errands and set up the party.

Our reception plan is deceptively simple on the outside, with a lot of work to make it happen (aren’t most?).  For the food, we have chosen San Tung chinese food.  This is great because the food is wonderful and it is affordable.  This is difficult because San Tung does not deliver or cater, which means someone has to drive over to 11th & Irving to pick up the dinner food, bring it back to the house, put it on serving dishes for the tables and in pans that can be kept warm in the oven, and serve the dinner.

Then we added to the complications.  We’re not having a traditional wedding cake.  Instead, we are ordering three small mousse cakes from Schubert’s Bakery on 6th Avenue and Clement Street.  Schubert’s doesn’t deliver their regular cakes, so these will also need to be picked up and refrigerated before the reception.*

*If you tell Schubert’s you have a long drive, they will freeze your mousse cakes so that the cakes hold their shape better during transit.  We’ll be doing this so that the cakes will hold up while on display during dinner.

In addition to the three small cakes, we’re going to serve a variety of cupcakes from That Takes the Cake on Union Street, which will also need to be picked up and set up.

Note:  Watch for our reviews of the cakes and cupcakes coming later this week.  Holy cow.  Put these bakeries on your “must do” list for your next visit to San Francisco.

Reason #4: We need someone who can serve the dinner, refresh the teapots, serve drinks, and help us clean up.  This is part of the plan to keep our families from turning into event staff.

Reason #5: We need rental items, but don’t want to deal with a rental company, many of which won’t deliver and pick up (a) same day and (b) on a Monday.  Because Vera coordinates the Canvas Underground house parties, she has tables, chairs, linens, dinner and serveware, which she is bringing with her.  Yay for simplification and one less vendor!

Reason #6: The reception is being held at a house; we will need to shuffle furniture around and put it back where it belongs at the end of the night so that everyone who is staying at the house can go to bed.  This will take some work.

Reason #7: This is a second wedding, so I don’t have a posse who are particularly eager to be talking wedding and helping with my ideas, shopping, DIY and to-do list.  I think having someone who wants to hear all the details and gets excited about them and can bounce new ideas around is critical to my own feeling of excitement.  Yes, it’s nice to talk to Tony about wedding stuff, but to be honest, he is just not that interested in table decorations and the like.

Final note on picking a wedding coordinator: We are limiting our guests to immediate family and our closest friends, so it was important to us to (a) limit the number of vendors who will be at the wedding with us and (b) make sure the vendors who are actually there on our wedding day are people who will blend well with our group.  We want to feel like we are among our friends, and that includes our coordinator, photographer, and entertainment.