the chair incident

As I was leaving work today, I called my mom to get an update on some vendor calls she made for me. She had two objectives: see how much lighting would cost and reserve the rental chairs for the ceremony and reception.

Let's go backwards though. When I first booked at the IMU, Kirk and I went to Bloomington to talk to the venue coordinator. I specifically asked about gold chiavari chairs and she said she had some in her garage right now and they cost $3/chair. I knew that was a very low price, but assumed the IMU just had low prices! She also informed us the ceremony chairs would have to be rented from a company and gave us that number.

Then last week my parents went down to Bloomington to meet with the florist and the coordinator again. At the meeting with the coordinator, my mom asked about the chiavari chairs and was informed that the IMU doesn't have them, they're also from the rental company. Okay. She sometimes gets the chairs delivered to her house, explaining the whole garage spiel.

So my mom calls the rental company today to reserve the chiavari chairs. They are not $3. Not even close. They're $8.50! We don't have the budget for that and even if we did, there's an extra $300 delivery fee because they're in Indianapolis.

I know they're just chairs, but I was devastated. I've never really liked our reception room, but the fact that we'd have nice chairs and linens and some possible lighting was a compromise for me.

I'll go ahead and chalk this up to a massive miscommunication on my coordinator's part. Maybe I didn't ask enough questions about the chairs originally and get clarification. But this was one small aspect of the wedding that I was really looking forward to having.

I'm now trying to figure out if there's a way to have both the ceremony and reception outside in the courtyard and at least share the rented wooden chairs we'll be getting. If anyone has any advice on such an endeavor, feel free to comment below! Or if you just want to complain about chairs, that's fine too :)