By Katharine

Last weekend Nathan and I made great progress in planning our wedding- We selected a venue and a date and signed the contract! We will be getting married on August 6, 2011 at Middle Ranch in Lake View Terrace, CA.

I feel like a big weight has been lifted off my shoulders now… and now I feel like we can start thinking about the smaller details like invitations, colors, decorations, etc.

The venue search was pretty involved for us, we started with a ridiculous list I made of places in SoCal that had pretty trees (my one requirement) without any idea of pricing. Then I started adding expected pricing as best as I could from various websites and I realized that most of these places were way out of our league. So then I made a second ridiculous list of more budget-friendly venues.  Together we combined the reasonable ones from each list to get a list of 50 possible places. I don’t know how it came out to be a perfect 50, that was not intentional! We narrowed those down to 11 that we wanted to pursue and started making phone calls. Our first call was already completely booked for summer 2011… and we started to freak out a bit, but luckily most other places had some open weekends. We ended up visiting 5 places and liking 3. And we are very happy with our final decision. Plus, catering is included as apart of the package, so we now have our caterer selected as well!

How can you go wrong with a place that has trees like this:

We really liked Middle Ranch because it has a very laid back atmosphere, but is still elegant with an open/airy feel. We will have access to a nice lawn area for the ceremony and a lodge and outdoor patio area for the reception. And there are beautiful large trees speckled throughout… so I love it!

Well, we can officially begin the countdown to our wedding!

You can see more pictures of the venue here.