A Place for Guests to Park It

Our venue comes with perfectly good, perfectly free chairs.

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Sigh. They may be usable and free, but they are completely mis-matched and on the ugly-ish side of the folding chair spectrum. Free chairs: I know, I really shouldn't be complaining. But the reality is that these chairs were messing with my grand wedding vision, and having just managed to even form a vision, I was a little upset at it being so easily (and quickly) disturbed.

See, in my fantasy land, we would have the gold standard of all wedding seating: the Chiavari chair.

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Elegant and dignified, these chairs say, "we care about your tuckus enough not to put you in a folding chair."  They also say "I cost a lot!"  Mr. Goodlaff and I are getting married in a rural area, which means our local supply options are few and delivery charges from larger cities are high.  The Chiavari chairs would have cost us about $8 a piece. Multiply that by 150 guests and you have an amount of money better spent on stocking the bar. Budget-wise, it just didn't make sense.

  

Next on the list? Chair covers.  If you can't get rid of the chair, cover it up, right? In general, I think most chair covers look fussy, pretentious, and cheesy.  Most pictures of chair covers look rumpled like this:

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But they can also look crisp, clean, and classy too.

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Despite my misgivings, I looked into renting the covers. After calling around, it turned out that renting covers and ribbons would cost even more than the Chiavari chairs, effectively killing that idea.

Around that time the caterer sent me to a party rental store to pick out our wedding day dishes (included in her price), and as I was poking around in the store, I spotted them: white, $1 per chair, and comfy. Just like that, my wedding vision was back on track. The $150 price tag was completely do-able, and though they're not Chiavari, I think will look great in our venue and fit with our garden party theme.  

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It's probably silly of me to insist on these chairs when we already have access to free chairs, but it just looks so much better. Clean, fresh, and crisp is the look we're going for, and these chairs start us on our way there.

Was there any wedding detail you insisted upon that was purely for looks?