Wedding venue budget....

We're looking at country house hotels, have budgeted around £6000 for venue and catering. Found a few that fit in with that and offer really good packages. My favorite atm is charging £4300 for room hire, breakfast, drinks and buffet then for extra £1250 they'll dress venue, get a dj for evening and few other bits. Everything is so expensive!! First venue i looked at was £7500 just to hire the space ?

We are getting married at a Manor House Hotel type venue on a Saturday. It cost £500 to hire their orangery for our ceremony, and then £1,000 for the reception room hire. Then its £70 per adult for wedding breakfast and wine. £12 per adult for the evening buffet. With our numbers and adding on things like canapés its around the £7,000 mark.

We're getting married on a Sunday so slightly cheaper but ours is £4,500 for 60 guests with canapes, welcome drink, 3 course sit down wedding breakfast, evening buffet for 100 with D.J and bridal suite included. It's at Salford Hall Hotel, Warwickshire.

We have Gaynes Park in Epping Essex. It's a country barn & orangery set in beautiful gardens. Venue hire alone £4800......that doesn't include anything except exclusive use & a wedding co-ordinator....Gulp!!

My partner and I ideally wanted a hotel, but everything we were looking at for around 50 guests was £4000 + without any other bits like dress, transport etc etc

It would have been nice in a hotel as everyone could have stayed however we could not justify it on our budget of £6000

We opted for a lovely barn/village hall which was £750 with the option to also have the ceremony there for £150 - so £900 in total

We have also opted for a hogroast as a 3 course meal was making it too expensive

we now have 66 guests and have got a hogroast which feeds up to 120 people for £995

So really we have managed to slice the price in half

Yes, we have to do a lot of DIY bits ourselves, but I sorta like that

Sometimes hotels have too many rules of what you can't do/have

Good luck in the search, always keep an open mind

We are having it a county house hotel in the North Yorkshire. Total spend as below

room hire - £500 for 2 rooms (reduced to £350 as we are getting married in March)

we aren't having welcome drinks in the traditional sense but are buying everyone a drink from the bar

sit down 3 course meal from £28 per person (actual price depends on menu choice cheapest is soup started, Turkey main ect)

We are having 60 adults and 10 children at the sit down meal (children are £8.95 each)

Evening buffet the cheaper option was £8.50 but we are having the £10.50 option that has more choice.

we get a complimentary room for the wedding night

all in all we are paying the venue about £3,400 for our wedding

not us in the photos

Our is at a country club and its just short of £7k for the room, breakfast and wine for 50 people then 2 bottles on the tables, buffett for 90 people, canapes and to have the ceremony there. ours is a saturday so that an extra £500.

We are paying £6900 for a country hotel in devon. This includes 17 rooms, afternoon tea for 100 guests, 10 jugs of pimms and a hog roast for the evening. It depends on what your after and where you can save the money. We went for an afternoon tea as it cut the cost to half the price for a wedding breakfast, and we didn't want to have to do 2 big meals for guests as we have a 2pm ceremony.

Enjoy searching, I found it so much fun. Oh and haggle the price down where you can, see what venues will offer you

We're at a water sports activity centre that has a large function room and it's own private bar / cafe area.

To hire the roof top terrace for our ceremony, the cafe / bar area for drinks reception and the function room and patio for evening is £300. We're providing all our own food / drink but will be paying corkage which comes to about £40 for a drink for everyone for the drinks reception.

We also get gorgeous waterfront views and lots of outdoor space. Looking outside the box was def worth it!!

We paid £3240 for room hire. Our food and drinks bill is going to be about £7300. That's for roughly 110 for the meal and about 135 for evening.

We are getting married at Hyde Barn in Stow, in the Cotswolds. It's reasonably priced, they are very flexible and if you get married on a weekday it's SO much cheaper!! The ladies are so helpful and accommodating too. All prices are on their website I think.

We're getting married at a stately home on a Friday but the room hire charges were the same whatever week day. Including venue hire and catering for 40 day guests (3-course meal) and 75 evening guests (canapés), excluding welcome drinks, we're paying £4500. It's definitely expensive but other places were even dearer. At least they dress the venue for us. They are our biggest expenses as I'm trying to make quite a lot myself, that's how we can afford to get married there. Good luck!

Ours got quite expensive because of having to have a marquee. We're getting married in a vineyard which cost around £1300 to hire for the day including having our ceremony there and the staff help us out running the day and liaising with vendors, but the marquee cost about £4000 on top of that. We're then spending another £2800 for catering - one of the things that was important to us was being able to have fab food and choose our own caterers. The costs include hiring a generator, all furniture, table linens, lighting, catering tent, staff, crockery and glasses etc. and we went for a larger marquee so we could have a band and dancefloor which added to the cost a bit.

There are definitely MUCH cheaper options out there, our venue is beautiful and I'm sure it will be lovely but I think we got sucked in by it and didn't realise exactly how much everything would cost all together - particularly the marquee. I would definitely advise getting a realistic idea of the exact costs before jumping in! We had guestimated the cost of the marquee WAY lower than it turned out to be. Fortunately we can afford it without being in debt but I would have preferred to spend less!

P.s. if it helps to put it in context, the venue and catering all together will probably be around 55% of our total budget (if all goes to plan!).

Thanks ladies - all your venues look lovely!!!

That's been really helpful, shows me that i'm on track with what i'm looking at but also made me realise that the venue is going to be one big fat chunk of the budget! Eeek!!

Here's to successful venue hunting.....

Good luck, you'll be fine x