From mud to magic
Posted on 3rd June 2024 at 16:00
It has been a long time in the making…but finally Low Osgoodby Grange Weddings Venue is up and running as a semi permanent site.
The stunning lakeside wedding venue is up and running! Gone are the days of worrying about soggy ground and waterlogged fields…and welcome a summer of weddings with a fully decked, outdoor wedding venue! But it wasn't easy….and it certainly wasn't plain sailing!
We applied for planning permission for our wedding venue back in July 2023, we hoped we would have planning by the autumn at the latest, giving us plenty of time to build the site before our first wedding in April! But no….the planning process was delayed and delayed and we finally received planning in March 2024!
This gave us only 5 weeks to create the vision we had for the site…and typically the Great British Weather provided us with 5 of the wettest weeks in history! It Did. Not. Stop!
So.. at the beginning of March we (well….my amazing husband Rob who stepped in, putting his own career aside for 2 months!) began building the site. The ground was so waterlogged we had to carry everything (and i mean everything!) 100m from the track to the site. We then set about putting together the jigsaw of a tipi base that I had purchased 2 years ago from a closing tipi wedding venue.
With the help of some of our tipi team (John, Charlie, Sammy, Beanz…and the odd child) and the amazing Mikey Pea (who stepped in last minute with some extra joinery skills), Rob built the deck and laid the floor.
There were days and weeks of piecing together the wooden base, which has previously been numbered to allow for us to reassemble, cutting floorboards, sinking posts into the ground and levelling, levelling levelling! We eventually found ourselves with a beautiful wooden island in a sea of mud! The tipis finally went up at the end of March.
We needed to build a path to get wedding guests from the track to the tipis with only 1 week to go. For year 1 we built a wooden edged path with wood chippings, this will be upgraded in 2024 to a full wooden walkway.
The first wedding went ahead without the addition of the car park (we ran out of time), however by wedding 4 we managed to get the car park and suppliers track laid as well as build a wooden walkway from the tipis to the toilet block... ooh and we bought a ride on lawn mower!!
Finally it is all coming together!
So far we have had 4 amazing weddings, all totally different and all utilising different wedding ceremony areas. We now have the stunning woodland ceremony area, the lakeside ceremony arch and the internal, tipi ceremony space. We can cater for all weddings and all weathers!
We still have lots of features we want to add to the venue, the bell tents are a great addition but perhaps in the future we will put up some glamping pods as well.
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