disneyberry's Wedding TR: Wedding Pavilion/Citricos Oct.2008 [Intro for now]

disneyberry · Oct 18, 2008

EDIT from Aug 2011: Some day, some year, I will complete this report. I'm just too preoccupied with other things these past few years.

Hey everyone ^^

Well DH (weird to finally use that term!) and I are back from our wedding week in Disney. This report will take me a while to write up; I'm going to work on it a little bit at a time. I also never wrote a Planning Journal beforehand 'cause first of all I'm usually pretty shy about sharing personal details online, and truly I just didn't have the time to do it! I think I might begin this whole report with an after-the-fact PJ of sorts. ^^ You'll see that my planning was definitely heavily influenced by you lovely DISers! Unfortunately this means I won't get to the final wedding report for a while, but I think it'll all be a lot more logical this way.

Wedding Summary

Wedding Type: Wishes Collection

Number of Guests: 38

Day of the Week: Monday (For the $10k Minimum, which, alas, I think we exceeded by far!)

Ceremony: Wedding Pavilion, earliest time slot 10AM

Reception: Citricos at the Grand Floridian, Pre-Reception from 11AM - 12PM, Lunch from 12PM - 3PM

Welcome Dinner: Jiko at Animal Kingdom Lodge

Farewell Breakfast: Fresh at Walt Disney World Dolphin

Room Block Resorts: Coronado Springs Resort, Beach Club Resort, and Port Orleans French Quarter

Where we stayed: Boardwalk Villas

Officiant: Ron Rosenzweig

Photographer: Root Photography

Videographer: Starfruit Productions

Cosmetologist: Patricia LeJeune

Notable Things We Had: Cinderella's Carriage, String Trio, MK + Epcot Photo Shoot

I'll leave off at that for now. I'm going to try to pre-write a bunch of posts and submit them in succession to keep the bulk of the report in consecutive posts so people don't have to page through too much.

Edit: Oh, we got access to our DPS MK + Epcot photo shoot pics. Here's a sneak peak shot (if you are observant, you will discover something in the pic that's a spoiler to my trip report!

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Wazzo · Oct 18, 2008

Hooray! I can't wait to read more! :goodvibes

disneyberry · Oct 18, 2008

"Sidebar" - The weird emoticons I use:
Some of you might be confused by the random symbols I type hehe. Just thought I'd give a short explanation here about them.

Western emoticons focus more on the mouth, and are usually sideways, such as the often seen smiley face

Some emoticons I've become used to using are common in Asia, and usually are right side up and focusing on eyes. So ^_^ is a smiley face, which is often abbreviated into ^^ and >.> is a shifty-eyed kind of sarcastic face. ;_; is an unhappy face with tears coming out of the eyes, and abbreviated it's ; ; Those are the 3 I use the most.

Here's a couple of links about this, in case you're curious ^^
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon#Eastern_style
http://club.pep.ne.jp/~hiroette/en/facemarks/

About Us:
DH and I were college sweethearts.
We're now in our 30s.
Add those two lines together and you'll figure out that we've been together for a long time and we only just got married now haha.

Like many DFTW couples, we rediscovered our love for Disney when we first went on a WDW vacation together as adults. We kind of went nuts for WDW after that (see sig lol) and ended up buying DVC together 5 years ago. (I'm gonna have a big hassle to go through to change our DVC deed to my married name now lol)

Our engagement story is one that DH would probably not want me to go into details about hehe. I say that I'm shy, but DH is super guarded about giving out personal details. Let's just say that we finally got engaged in summer of 2007, and the proposal was on the boardwalk in front of the Yacht Club wedding gazebo (not intentionally), and it was very sweet ^^ despite being slightly comical.

We didn't actually have any plans or a set timeframe for when we wanted our wedding after we got engaged. A Disney wedding wasn't even a serious consideration in the beginning, but rather something we joked around about, knowing our families would find the whole concept crazy. I don't actually remember how the conversation went, but basically about 4 months after our engagement, DH started saying that maybe we should just do a Disney wedding and forget about what our families will think. We'd always been keen on doing a destination wedding of some sort anyway because of the ease of having a resort that's fully equipped to handle weddings and has a wedding planning team helping you organize everything.

Impromptu Site Visit:

DH and I already had a WDW vacation booked for the end of October 2007. We decided to call DFTW and see about meeting with someone that week to begin the whole planning process. I think that DFTW may have pencilled us in for some random date (we had nooo idea what date we wanted yet) that I told them on the phone.

Here's where the interesting stuff begins (i.e. Pictures!). DH and I didn't want to waste all our time with the sales coordinator, so we decided to go to as many wedding reception sites as possible that we could enter and look at on our own without being accompanied by someone in DFTW. Our ceremony site was a no-brainer, we wanted WP and that was that.

We'd narrowed down reception sites based on some helpful websites (like Mouseweddings) also. We knew we were having a morning wedding with a daytime reception, so we really tried to look at places with nice natural lighting - i.e. windows! So here's a series of pics from various reception sites that we either asked a CM to let us see, or >.> we snuck into late at night! LOL shhhh! (what... the ballrooms were empty at 10pm!)

Bistro de Paris
Main dining area

Possible dancefloor area (tables would be removed)

View back towards dining area while standing in dancefloor area

Gorgeous spiral staircase leading to/from restaurant (yes, that's me)

Entrance to restaurant as seen from top of the staircase

Grand Floridian Ballrooms
One of the entrance foyers (I think Southwest)

One of the larger ballrooms, Salon 4, 5 or 6

Closeup of double doors in white

Same ballroom (Salon 4,5,6) closeup of painting

Closeup of wall divider (eww, they tried to make it nicer, but it still looks ugly IMO)

One of the small boardrooms with windows (was either Palm Beach or Key West)

Another entrance foyer (I think the main big one in the center)

Whitehall outside patio hallway

Whitehall patio

French doors of Whitehall patio hallway

French doors of Whitehall

Indoor entrance doors to Whitehall

Indoor hallway to Whitehall

Inside Whitehall

Whitehall's Chandelier

Inside Whitehall

disneyberry · Oct 18, 2008

Boardwalk Ballrooms

St. James was divided in half when we went, so the next few pics are of each division (basically side B and side A)

Doors leading to patio, and wall divider

Closeup of double doors to inside hallway (dark green, yuck!)

Another door leading to patio, and other side of wall divider

Last door leading to patio, and here you can see the natural wall of St. James (much better than the dividers)

Creeeepy hallway

Foyer, still creeping us out (remember this is at almost midnight, not a single person around, and the whole thing is screaming Haunted Mansion at us lol)

Chandelier in Foyer

OMG scary portrait outside men's room

Argh, even scarier portrait outside women's room!

I think this is Marvin Gardens

Windows in Marvin Gardens

Marvin Gardens

Okay! So that concluded our evening. Let me give an explanation of what our thoughts were after that day. We loved Bistro de Paris a lot, but were told that we cannot change the decor of the restaurant at all. This wasn't a big deal since it's very pretty as is, however that would impact our choice of color theme probably. The nail in the coffin though, was that Bistro de Paris is a privately managed place, and they don't have a special catering staff for weddings. We wouldn't be able to use Epcot catering (who is used to doing weddings), and would have to rely upon the regular staff at the restaurant doing a good job. Ugh.

For the ballrooms, obviously I was in love with Whitehall, but our guest count at the time we first started planning was around 70 people. Also, you cannot book a ballroom until 7 months out.

At the Boardwalk, St James and Marvin Gardens were big considerations due to the windows + patio, but we really really hated the dark green doors and lol, if you couldn't tell, the paintings and layout of the hallways drove us crazy and seemed really not wedding-y.

That leads us to our meeting the next morning with our DFTW Sales coordinator. The one site we couldn't have visited without her was Citricos. When we told her where we'd already visited and how much we cared about beautiful natural light, she knew immediately we were gonna love Citricos. She brought us into the restaurant, and it was gorgeous! Then she said, "Oh just wait, this back area has a rotunda like whitehall" and OMG that was it, we knew Citricos was our reception site.

Pics of Citricos (I only took 3! I don't know what was wrong with me, I wished all throughout our wedding planning process that I'd taken more, especially when it came to doing the seating chart!)

Front of restaurant, as seen from the back

Rotunda, look at those windows!

More of the rotunda area

disneyberry · Oct 18, 2008