I’m talking about chairs and chair covers today. I know, don’t get too excited. 🙂 But, when you think about it, even though chairs are such a minor consideration compared to other aspects of the day, they will probably sneak into a good amount of the wedding photos. And I don’t want them to look out of place. Yet, in the same vein, our budget didn’t and still doesn’t have a wedding chair contingency plan. Hmm, what’s a girl to do? Let me relay our mini-dilemma.

The first time we toured our venue, our ceremony room was set up for a business conference. Picture long tables covered with white linens and mauve cloth covered metallic legged chairs manufactured in the 1980s, possibly the early 90s. I perused the room, completely skipping over the chairs, because in my bratty (albeit naive) bridal mind, I assumed that our venue would be providing us with those pretty, “ladies lunching”, delicate chairs that I had seen at friends’ weddings before. Something like this:

{Sigh} I later learned that the chairs I was envisioning were called “chivari chairs”. When presented with my complimentary chivari chair assumption, our catering manager laughed and resolved my rookie mistake by handing me their pricing guide for venue chairs. My brief love affair with the chivaris ended abruptly. Heck, our venue didn’t even offer free chair covers. You mean I have to pay you to cover up your ugly chairs? Huh? Here is a sampling of what they look like:

In retrospect, they were not bad, but certainly were not the chivari chairs. Initially, I decided that our chairs would need to be covered. So we negotiated with our venue’s manager and got her to throw in chair covers and sashes for free. Sweet. So with covers, the chairs might look like this: I still couldn’t decide whether I liked the chair cover look or if there was just too much fabric going on. I’ve been in limbo about this for months. Then I got an idea from WeddingbeePRO, Courtney at Flush Designs (more on our meeting in a future post) that I hadn’t thought of before. She suggested we might think about using the chairs as is. They might fit in nicely with our vintage-inspired theme and the chair covers might actually make the room look too busy. I tend to agree with her line of thinking, and I am now leaning towards not covering the chairs. How will you handle your venue’s chair situation? Will you cover them or not? Image Source 1, 2, 3