Has anybody had a wedding reception in a church or community hall?

Question

I'm planning a wedding for next November 2009. I was wondering how to go about booking, setting up, catering, alcohol and clean up in a hall?

Can anybody tell me if they have or know of someone who has had there wedding at a hall? And can you tell me who sets it up and cleans up as I'm the Bride I won't be setting up or cleaning up, and I don't expect my guests to do it either. Can I hire someone to do it for me? Or is it best to just go to a reception place (these are expensive, but will i be saving any money going to a hall?)

Answer 1

Consider an American Legion, if you have one in your town.  You just need to know a member.  Anyway, we had our rehearsal dinner at a local Legion and they were wonderful!  They were inexpensive, made, set up and served all the food, cleaned up and served drinks as well!  It was wonderful.  We didn't decorate, though we could have.  Look into it ...they were very accomodating and inexpensive.  We had about 40 people eat a generous meal for about $250.  Very nice...

Answer 2

Hi.  I personally did not have my wedding in a church or community hall, but I have been to LOTS of weddings/receptions in those places....VFW halls, Elks Clubs, Amvets Halls, etc.

What you need to do is to look over their facilities.  See what they have to offer you.  Many WILL set up and clean up for you (for a fee, of course).  Others....well, you are on your own.

So many of these places rent out their venues for weddings, so I'm sure they have all their policies written down and would give you a copy.  Regarding alcohol....it really depends on your state liquor laws.  Some places will not let you bring in alcohol, some will.  It is all regulated by the state that you live in.

Yes, I have been to many, many wedding receptions in community halls (as I live in a small town and we are limited here).  They can be very, very nice.

The thing for you to do is to cost compare a few of these places as compared to a regular reception place.  Figure out how much the set up/clean up will be, the cost to bring in your own caterer, alcohol (and who will serve it?), etc. etc.  Then, compare that with a reception place that has everything.  

Good luck in your search!

Answer 3

My caterer is all-inclusive, meaning she gets the rentals, sets up everything ... tables, linens, food, etc. (gets it ready for the florists to come in behind her) and then she will clean up afterwards, return rentals, wash dishes, etc. You might pay a little more this way, but I think it is definitely worth not having our parents do it after the event. Good Luck!!

Answer 4

If your wedding is next year, you had better get cracking! Halls are booked way in advance.  I would start with where you are getting married.  Then try to find all of the facilities that are within a close proximity to your wedding site.  Call these places and ask for availability for the date that you want.  If the site is available, proceed to asking about:

      person capacity--bring in your own food or have to use their catering--bring in own beverages or cost of theirs--if they have wait staff that can do the food serving and clean-up and cost--downpayment for hall--how late they allow the reception to go on--any other specifics that might be special to your ceremony.  Sometimes it is even more special if you can organize an outside wedding at a park. You can call the town's chamber of commerce and they can get you in touch with the park's director to work out the site and the cost if any.  You would be surprised how many of your relatives are happy to help out to make your day great.  If you organize it ahead(or get your maid-of-honor), most people are happy to help.They can all bring a dish, and they get to show off their homewares.  Good Luck!

Answer 5

I had my wedding at a church hall a month ago.  You can just call the church office and talk about reserving a room.  We had the wedding in the adjoining chapel and needed to deal with them for that anyway so it wasn't much extra work.  As far as the prices, it seemed much better than the couple of reception places I looked at.

My husband has a cousin who thankfully stepped in and did a lot of the work of setting up and cleaning up on the actual day.  His step-mom and a friend  helped as well.  It was a big relief actually as we hadn't planned it ahead of time, and I thought I'd still have to be running the show on the wedding day.  After all the work that went into getting things together right before the wedding, it was nice to just be able to sit back and enjoy the wedding itself.

Since I wasn't involved in the actual set-up myself, I couldn't tell you how hard the actual work was.  It didn't seem too bad though.  They had to arrange the tables and chairs, put on the linens, and the centerpieces that I'd bought.  By the way, the church let us borrow their tables, chairs, and even tablecloths.  The only thing we really had to buy where decorations and centerpieces, but the place we used was nice enough that it didn't need much decorating.  

We went with a catering company that just advertised itself for general parties and business events, rather than one that advertised as a wedding and special events planner.  It was much cheaper that way.  The food looked to be basically the same.  The only real difference was probably that they gave us plastic plates and utensils as opposed to real silverware.  We went with their most expensive option which was still a lot cheaper than at places that were wedding caterers.  Usually, they would have included servers with that option, but by the time I booked them, the servers were already going to be elsewhere so instead we got a discount of $3 per plate.  It did mean some extra work for the folks who were dealing with the set-up.

We didn't serve alcohol since in our state we would have needed to get a liquor license in advance and because neither my husband nor I are drinkers.  I did kind of regret it afterwards just because a couple of people complained.

The clean up was just putting everything back in place.  We also had to take the tablecloths home afterwards and wash them.  That was the only thing that really had to be "cleaned" per se.  The hardest part I think was carrying all the extra food and equipment back to our car.  We made the mistake of not telling our caterers when to come pick up their equipment so we ended up having to lug that back with us well.  Otherwise, everything that had to go back in the car were things we would have had to carry back with us anyway.

Somebody mentioned to me that sometimes the church may have members work as servers and to help you set up things in exchange for a donation to the church, but I have never heard of our church doing anything like that.

I am not sure how much less work would be involved with a reception place, but I would recommend checking out the prices for both.  With the money we saved compared to the reception place I looked at, we could easily have offered to take a few of our friends out to dinner at a nice restaurant in exchange for their help with this, and still had a lot more money left over.