It’s me! Your Berkshires Wedding Planner!

We’ve finally crossed the threshold of our first wedding for the 2023 season! From start to finish it was so lovely to see this beautiful wedding come to life.

This past weekend, I coordinated a wedding I had planned in Pittsfield, MA, at Herman Melville’s Arrowhead Historic Home. And let me tell you, this was an EVENT, from start to finish! To have a wedding like this kicking off my season as a wedding planner is nothing short of a good sign about what’s to come. So let’s dive in!

Smooth Sailing Until…

A Nice Day For A White Whale-er-Wedding

I started working with this couple a few months into their own wedding planning. They started to secure vendors already, but wanted some help with the finer vendor details, and just to have everything checked off the list and handled so they could just have fun on their special day. A prime example of why a wedding planner couldn’t be more perfect to hire.

What made the planning kismet was I was already in touch with Arrowhead as I had a few couples interested in hosting their wedding on the property. This couple who brought me on was already signed on to work with Arrowhead, and was actually the first ever wedding to be held on the property. This is the same property where Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick! No joke!

The Great Storm of 15 Minutes

The wedding ready to go…before the storm struck!

And so going into the day, we knew that having the ceremony outdoors meant that we needed the wedding to have a rain plan. Easy! But of course, the goal is to avoid that as much as possible.

So on the day of, I arrive on the property with the beautiful tent set up, DJ fixing and installing the lighting he brought in, and the catering setting up the food. There’s a small barn on the property which was going to be a focal point for the highlights of the evening. The dinner and dancing would be in the tent on the lawn, but we wanted ceremony, cake cutting, and cocktail hour to be in the barn. The idea was the barn would remain closed with the ceremony in front of the barn.

Once the ceremony was finished, the idea was we would then swing open the doors for the crowd to see the beautiful scape inside of food and drink where they would enjoy cocktail hour. Weeeelll, the weather had other plans.

Couldn’t be happier to see the sun shining!

Literally 45 min before the wedding began, when everything was set up and ready to go, the rain began. First as a drizzle as the crowd began to walk in. And then the pouring started along with chilly winds. And it was in the 80’s the day before!

So, the crowd ran into the barn for dry space and warmth. And I don’t blame them! We then took out tents to cover the chairs, and even thought, “what if we just move the ceremony into the barn??”

Well…15 minutes before scheduled ceremony time the rain stopped and the sun was shining the brightest it had all day. So I took that as a sign to wipe down all of the chairs dry and open up the barn the most beautiful backdrop for an inevitably outdoor wedding.

After that, the crowd was primed to enjoy the rest of cocktail hour, slide right into dinner and dancing, and finish the night off with a delicious cake.

Final Thoughts

In the end, I couldn’t have asked for a better first wedding of the season. It was a very smooth planning process, with a wedding day that proved that even when you think of everything…that one detail will show itself. And despite that, I was able to work with an incredible team to make the wedding a memory that’ll last a lifetime.