The Cottage At Ravines

Beautiful but complicated…

To our surprise, our ceremony & reception ended up being being beautiful. I love that they set up all tables, chairs, linens, napkins, and had goblets that really dressed up the table. While planning the wedding my fiancé and I were surprised at the lack of attention to detail in the planning process. We had to tell Sarah, the person of contact many times what we wanted as she asked us many of the same questions we had already given answers to. She also sent us a google form they have you fill out which is so confusing and unorganized. She told us they would put out a welcome sign that read “welcome to the wedding of ____ & _____” but the day of there was no sign out and our guests were confused on where to go. Included in the rental was the bridal suite which is a small room with 3 stools and mirrors. Upon arrival there was a huge table in the there literally taking up over half the room which my mom had to ask them to remove even though we arrived an hour after our rental time was started. When my mom brought this up they responded that they “didn’t have anywhere else to put it”….really?! We PAID to use this room. They ended up finding a spot for it. In addition to this I had communicated with Sarah about how our DJ would be arriving early to set up. The day of our wedding they decided to cut power to the ceremony space which is where my DJ needed to set up and test equipment. They did not tell me at all and I only found out because my DJ told me moments before I arrived at the venue. When I arrived I spoke to Shayla and very kindly communicated my frustration and asked her what was going on. She said that they had shut off the power to drain water or something and that someone would be there within the hour to turn it back on. She did not apologize or have any empathy for the situation and just said with a straight face “well DJSs don’t normally arrive this early to set up” I responded “Okay…I told Sarah that he would be here at ____ time” and she just said she didn’t know and honestly really didn’t seem to care which was a huge bummer. My DJ had been there for hours before I got there and I felt so bad for him. For the unity portion of our ceremony we needed a small table - they put an ivory table cloth on it that almost looked yellow and looks terrible in our pics when I had requested linens to be white…my dress was white, flowers that I had at the altar were white & had a white fabric wrapped around the altar. So it definitely clashed. I didn’t see it until walking down the aisle and at that point it didn’t matter but I wish they would’ve been more thoughtful with that. They also seemed to want to squeeze every dollar out of us… as they offered us beverage services many times because we did no alcohol, when I declined like 3 times they offered it again but a little cheaper…that was interesting. It seemed like they were trying to up our bill. To my surprise everything ended up beautiful but the day started with tears because I was stressed, frustrated, and upset at the lack of empathy or planning on the staff here. And trust me, I was a chill bride. I do have to say the food was SO good and all the catering staff I came into contact with were so kind and helpful. The venue did let us use golf cart for pics and transporting sound equipment from ceremony to reception since it was the off season. This was such a blessing. They also allowed us to set up our decor in the reception area the night before which was incredibly helpful.