Welcome back to Wedding Wednesday! Before I get into sharing photo recap posts of the wedding day itself, I wanted to recap the day before the wedding with you.
Truth be told, this was actually my favorite day of the wedding weekend! Yes, I really did enjoy the day before my wedding just a little more than my wedding day. I know that probably sounds crazy! But let me tell you, there was just something so exciting and electric about the great anticipation I had for my wedding day on the day before. It felt like my childhood excitement and anticipation on Christmas Eve for Santa to arrive... except times 100 on the excitement scale. 😊 Truly a certain type of anticipatory high that I've never experienced before, and I'm not sure I ever will again!
And as far as my favorite part of the day before our wedding, that would definitely go to our wedding welcome party on Friday evening! If anything, I hope this blog post might convince any brides-to-be reading that wedding welcome parties are the best, and every couple should have one if they're able to!
Now without further ado, let's get into recapping Friday, November 15th, 2024: the day before our wedding!
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Friday started bright and early with me finishing loading up my car with everything I'd need for the wedding weekend. I then drove over to Bayberry House, the beautiful beach rental house that myself and the bridal party would be in for the weekend! I got there right around 8am, and immediately brought in my wedding dress to hang in the master bedroom closet. I then brought in all of the bridal party gifts, and started quickly setting them up in the kitchen before anyone else arrived.
My bridesmaids Emily and Perrin arrived soon after, and then then the three of us headed over to my bridesmaids' brunch. My bridesmaids Ciera and Priyanka and my matron-of-honor Caroline met us directly at the restaurant. We all had a delicious meal at the Shore Drive location of Bay Local Eatery, which is in my opinion the best brunch spot in Virginia Beach (there's three locations!). The food is excellent, and they also have a great brunch drink menu. I had a delicious strawberry sorbet mimosa!
This was actually the first time my bridal party got to all be together! Three of them were able to make it to our engagement party, and three made it to my bachelorette party, but I was beyond ready to finally have everyone together and in the same place. That was another reason that doing a bridesmaids brunch before the rest of the Friday festivities was important to me!
After brunch, we went back to Bayberry House. We then got ready for a fun photoshoot in the house with the Transcendent Stays (property rental group that built and owns the house) marketing team! My dear friend blogging friend Gentry was flying in for the wedding festivities around lunchtime, so she took an Uber to the house and was able to join us for the photoshoot fun!
Next it was time to get changed for the rehearsal festivities, and head over to the church. Emily and Caroline's husbands were both working remotely from Virginia Beach that day, and they both kindly took a break from work to pick all of us ladies up and bring us to the church! They also brought Gentry over to her hotel.
I was an outfit repeater for my wedding rehearsal, and I wore the same white bow dress that I wore for our engagement photoshoot in March 2024. In a perfect world I would've bought a new outfit to wear for the rehearsal, but in the final months of wedding planning I was reminded every single day how expensive weddings are. When I realized that cutting out the cost of buying another new wedding weekend outfit could be eliminated by rewearing this dress, it was an easy decision! And I did still love the dress. I paired it with nude pumps and different earrings that I wore for engagement photos to help make it look a little different.
We had our ceremony rehearsal at our church in the late afternoon on Friday. It was a fairly small group, just Ryan and I, the wedding party, our pastor and church wedding coordinator, both sets of our parents, and my wedding coordinator, Ashley from Soirees by Lauren. The whole thing took a little under an hour from start to finish. I loved finally getting to carry the beautiful bow bouquet that my best friend Julia started making for me at my Maine bridal shower, and my friend Kelly-Anne hot glued and finished for me with more bows from my Virginia/North Carolina bridal shower! The selfie below of me and the bridal party is all of us checking out the room upstairs in the church that we'd be waiting in the next day for the ceremony to begin (and it's one of my favorite more casual photos from wedding weekend!).
Next it was time for our rehearsal dinner! We had an earlier rehearsal dinner meal so that we could have our welcome party (which all wedding guests were invited to) after, and be able to fit in both social functions without it being too late of a night. Ryan's parents generously hosted our rehearsal dinner a La Bella Italia, an Italian restaurant just a few miles away from our church. It was from 4:30-6:30pm. We were in a private room at La Bella, and Ryan's mom did a lovely job decorating the room with beautiful flowers and photos of our relationship.
Our rehearsal dinner menu is pictured below! I only remembered to snap a photo of my dessert, which was a delicious Italian coconut cake! There was also a cheesecake option as well (Ryan's pick).
Next, it was time to head to our welcome party! We had it at Surf Club Ocean Grille, which is the restaurant on-property at the Wyndham Virginia Beach hotel (our wedding reception venue). Ryan and I rode over to the Wyndham just the two of us in his car! It was the last time we'd get a few minutes of alone time together before our wedding day. 😊 After we parked, I had the idea to sneak up to the Wyndham ballroom and look at the set-up for our wedding reception the next day! I'm so glad we did that, as it's now one of my favorite little memories from Friday.
I made a whole TikTok video about this, but I cannot recommend enough to any engaged couples enough to have a big welcome party a day or two before your wedding! 100% the best decision we made for our wedding weekend. I've always enjoyed attending welcome parties when others have done them, and that's what made me want to do one in the first place. Every married friend always told me how quickly your wedding day goes by and how you always wish you had more time with the friends and family who traveled great distances to be there. Because we had a welcome party and more time with the special people in our lives, I am able to look back on our wedding weekend with gratitude for the time and conversations that I had with everyone! And that wouldn't have been possible without a welcome party.
I'm also here to tell you that you don't need to drastically increase your wedding budget to have a welcome party! As I mentioned, we had ours at the restaurant on-property of the hotel we had our wedding reception at. We didn't have to pay any site fees to have a welcome party there, since we were already giving so much business for the wedding reception! The restaurant had its own fun and casual decor, so we didn't bring in any decor. We had a lot more wedding guests decline our wedding than we had originally invited and budgeted for, so my parents generously used some of the money that was originally for the reception to go towards some appetizers for our welcome party. The welcome party was a full cash bar for both alcoholic and alcoholic beverages, so we didn't increase our budget with drinks. While I do think cash bars at wedding receptions themselves are tacky, I don't think it's tacky to do one at a welcome party as long as you specific to guests on the invitation that it is a cash bar!
We had 103 guests able to make it to our wedding, and I think around 60ish people made it to the welcome party, which was a great turnout! It was about half friends and half extended family. There was truly so much joy and excitement in the room. I also think it made me less nervous to be walking down the aisle the next day, since I'd already gotten to see a good chunk of our guests! It was truly so special to see certain friends and family members walk into the welcome party that Ryan and I hadn't seen in years.
I was so bad about taking pictures since I wanted to soak it up and be in the moment, but I did remember to get a few photos with some dear out-of-state friends who I don't get to see very often!
As much fun as I was having at our welcome party, I told my bridal party that I wanted them to be firm with me and make sure that I left around 8:30 pm. I didn't want to be up too late the night before our wedding! They stuck to their word, and before 9pm we were settling back into our rooms at Bayberry House for the night. But there was still one more bit of fun for the evening! My matron-of-honor Caroline coordinated with the bridesmaids to throw me the sweetest lingerie shower for the honeymoon! Since I had such a large bachelorette party with so many ladies, I didn't want to do a lingerie shower as part of that. It was much more my speed to do this with just the close friends in the bridal party! Caroline's attention-to-detail in everything that she did for my wedding was just wonderful, and the lingerie shower was no exception. I'll leave it at that for details 😉 but it was such a fun memory to conclude a great day.
The last part of Friday was getting to enjoy one of my favorite little surprises from the wedding weekend. My bridesmaid Emily surprised me with my favorite cake in the world: Princess Cake from Albemarle Baking Company in Charlottesville! This same cake was my going-away party cake in 2021 when I moved from Charlottesville to Virginia Beach, and it's also been many Charlottesville friends' cakes for other notable occasions (birthdays, bridal showers, etc). These are truly the most delicious cakes on the planet, and it was so fun to share it before bed on Friday with my out-of-state friends who hadn't tried one before.
And that concludes the day before our wedding. Next up for my Wedding Wednesday series: time to start recapping that actual wedding day itself!
Past Wedding Wednesday Posts:
Before the Wedding: Our Proposal Story // My Ring Shopping Experience // Local vs. Destination Wedding // My Wedding Dress Shopping Story // 9 Months Out Checklist + Early Wedding Planning Q&A // How Ryan and I Met // Our Engagement Photos // Virginia Beach Wedding Guest Lodging with Transcendent Stays // Our Engagement Party // 6 Months Out Checklist + Q&A // How I Asked My Bridesmaids // My First Bridal Shower // 3 Months Out Checklist + Q&A // My Second Bridal Shower // My Bachelorette Party // Doing My Own Wedding Day Makeup // Wedding Week Reflections
Post Wedding: Wedding Weekend Beach Rental House
God Bless,
xoxo Annaliese
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