The Brides' Review - 7/15 wedding review - Harbor Club, Marie Katz, Vision and more...with pics

elisabeth71506 Posted: Aug 01, 2006 01:40 PM+

elisabeth71506 MEMBER SINCE: 4/06 TOTAL POSTS : 273 WEDDING DATE: Jul 15, 2006

Posted: Aug 01, 2006 01:40 PM

7/15 wedding review - Harbor Club, Marie Katz, Vision and more...with pics

Our wedding day was the best day of my life. I can honestly say that I had a wonderful time, enjoyed every moment and it actually didnt go by too fast. My one piece of advice to all brides is to be 'in the moment'. Absorb every word of your ceremony, laugh a lot, smile endlessly and dont let anything get you down. I am an event planner for a living and I was sure that I would be crazed but I woke up the morning of the wedding with one calm thought - that by the end of the day I would be married to the love of my life and that was all that mattered :) On to the vendor reviews!!

Ratings 1-10 (1 poor, 10 fantastic)

Dress - Burtons Bridal -- 10
I wore Maggie Sottero's Grace. It was the first dress I picked up off the rack and tried on -- and it was the perfect dress for me. Not at all what I expected to wear and it was nothing like all the pics I clipped out of magazines. I did not find the dress at Burtons but my sister ordered hers through them and I had a good experience. I was able to get the dress for about 1/2 the price the bridal salon I found it at was asking for. I cant say enough how much I loved this dress. Carol was wonderful to work with and the alterations were perfect. The dress photographed so beautifully and I got so many compliments. I am tall so I couldnt wear a big poofy dress - I think this dress was made for me (I didnt even need to hem it!)

Bridesmaid Dresses - Burtons Bridal -- 10
Most of my bridesmaids were out of towners and my sister was pregnant when we were dress shopping so I got to try on wedding dresses and bridesmaid dresses. We ordered a B2 dress (I dont remember the style #). It was perfect for the occassion and went great with my dress. I thought my bridesmaids all looked beautiful in it. Most of them are mothers and married so I felt the dress was sophisticated but still a little flirty. The color was not what I expected but it ended up photographing beautifully

Reception - Harbor Club -- 10
Matt was great to work with and we had a beautiful event. My sister got married here and I remember that I was blown away by the food. The views on the water are beautiful, the staff was fantastic - My bridal attendant Cara was amazing. She was so attentive and took such good care of us. I requested her from my experince at my sister's wedding and she wowed us again. She is so sweet - even my husband loved the attention! thanks Cara!
Also, I challenged the baker with a difficult cake design and he deserves credit for a beautiful cake. I found a pic in a magazine that had song lyrics hand written on the cake so I asked them to do that for me. Matt wasnt sure he would be able to do it but the cake was gorgeous. It was exactly what I pictured.
Another great thing about this location was their willingness to accomodate our taste. Matt ordered Guiness and Negro Modelo beers for the groom and best man at no extra charge. He also followed through on every detail that I asked for - nothing was forgotten. The Harbor Club is the best!

Make-Up - Marie Katz - 10
Ok so again this is a vendor from my sister's wedding but I cant stop raving about what a talented artist she is. My make-up was outrageous, when I look at pictures I am so blown away with how perfect I looked! She also did make-up for my bridal party, mother and sister-in-law. She was very understanding with the girls that dont wear make-up often. None of us looked over-done. Marie also has such a friendly, outgoing personality. It was nice to have her in the house during the morning chaos. Marie is wonderful and I would recommend her highly to all brides!

Hair - Melanie and Cactus Salon - 10
Melanie came to our house and did hair for myself, my sister (MOH) and mother. She did an amazing job on all of us! I havevery fine hair and Mel managed to make it look full and gorgeous. I originally wanted to wear a large rose in my hair but the mornign of the wedding we realized that the flowers I had were not to going work. Luckily my mother found the perfect fake flowers in the basement. I was so unsure but Mel made it work and it looked better than what I thought I wanted.
Mel also does great color - she made me the prettiest blonde I have ever been - such attention to detail - she is so talented!
Mel also did an awesome job on my sister and mother's hair. It was great to be able to have our hair done at home - I highly recommend it!
The rest of my bridal party had their hair done at Cactus Salon. We had to pay extra to have them open early but the girls hair came out great and they all said they had a good experience there. One of my bridesmaids has crazy thick hair and she was amazed that it was put up and perfect in about 15 minutes!

Photography - Patken (Steve) -- Day of 10
After wedding 2
Steve was highly reommended on this board and he deserves every compliment. My husband and I loved his personality, we never got tired smiling for him. His direction is clear and he is very quick. I got a proof album in just over a week - 456 photos. The proofs are so creative yet classic. He really captured the love that we felt and we both look so relaxed and happy. So much about a photographer is personality. He was pleasant and unobtrusive -- even my mother liked him. He had a way of getting all of us to smile - even my Dad! Steve is great - I highly recommend him!!

*UPDATE - just feel like I need to add my experience 'post-wedding'. Unfortunately the photographers do not guide you through the creating your albums so my great experience with Steve ended after the wedding. Initially things went well - I got my proofs fast and they were beautiful. I find the office staff to be really hard to work with - they are very bad at 'managing expectations' - they've continually promised me a call in a week and then I hear nothing for a month. When I asked for an additional order of thank you pictures the ones I received were the worst quality printing I have ever seen so I asked them to forget it and refund my money and that took months to resolve. The printed my enlargements wrong more than 4 times -- all I asked them to do was crop the picture and they cant get it right. Then they printed another of the pictures in color when it should have been sepia. I am also unhappy with the quality of the prints - the paper is SO thin and I know that my sister's was printed on like a poster board. Then there is the album... I picked my pictures in November. They've had the album in the studio for 6 weeks and they told me there was a problem with 2 of the pages and in the last 6 weeks there has been no progress in trying to fix it -- after of course she told me it would be 2 weeks. I just want to get my stuff and be done with this already. The people in the office are nice enough but they really need more qualified people that will make the after the wedding experience as good as the day of. This experience has really impacted whether I would recommend using them to a friend.

Band - VISION - Franklin Wayne 10++
This is one choice that I was nervous about. My

husband and I travel full-time for a living so we sent my parents and my sister out to hear the showcase. They were also highly recommended by Matt at the Harbor Club. Having a great band was also important to us becuase my father-in law is blind and we knew that good music would make the day for him. Well I dont know what I was worrying about becuase this is the most amazing wedding band I have ever heard! Cisco and the band were amazzing. We had a talk the day before the wedding about the kind of music that i wanted to hear and the songs they chose were perfect. They played every special song I requested and totally rocked the house. The dance floor was packed all night long and I am still getting outstanding compliments! One particular moment that I wont forget was when this beautiful singer came out onto the dance floor and sang AT LAST (Etta James) to my husband and I while we were dancing. She was singing to us like there was no one else in the room. Her song had me in tears.....THEN at the end of the night she came up to us and said that she is shy and never leaves her mic to come out to sing to anyone but that she really saw how much we loved each other and felt so compfortable singing to us like that. She said she had never done that before! I wanted to take her home with me -- how wonderful!! This band does not have a lot of reviews on this board but they are amazing and talented - book them!

Dynasty Limo - 10
We had 2 limos and a Rolls. We got upgraded to a 14 pass limo the day before the event and we are lucky we did - we needed the room! The cars were early and the drivers were pleasant. I got the exact Rolls that I requested and it was clean and nice. The one thing I stressed about was the AC in the rolls and it worked fine. We had a 1/2 hour ride to the church and I wasnt sweating at all. The only AC issue was that the Rolls couldnt idle with the AC on so when we got to the church early we parked under a tree and opened the windows. They did a great job!

Flowers - Fleurafina - 7
This vendor was recommended by Harbor Club (they are their house florist) and the owner used to work for Spitz & Peck. All of our meetings leading up to the event were great. Again, I was planning the wedding from the road so I didnt spend a lot of time agonizing over flowers. The day before the wedding I met with him to go over lat minute details and he seemed really scattered and overwhelmed - not as organized as I anticipated so I got a little stressed. The day of the wedding the flowers arrived ontime but even though I went over it the day before the delivery men did not know what flowers needed to be delivered to the hotel/groom so I had to sit down and explain it again which stressed me out a little. I specifically requested an arrangement to be made for my parents house to put on the fireplace mantle where I would have pictures taken and they forgot to deliver it. It wasnt something I even remebered until he came up to me at the Harbor Club and told me they forgot to deliver it and asked what i wanted to do with it now ( a little late, right?). That was disappointing. The girls bo-ks were beautiful but not what I expected. We had discussed pink/green hydrangea bunches - but they were all green. I think it ended up looking better but I wish I had known tehre would be a chance that they would be like that so I wasnt surprised. The centerpieces were simple and nice, exactly as we discussed. As for my bo-k I hated it the first time I saw it but now that I look at it, I like it. It looked haphazard but I think it is the type of rose (titanic) that I chose. the stems were not wrapped well and it was hard to hold. The arrangment also wasnt tight - kind of loose. It just didnt look like he spent a lot of time on it but now that i look back I think that might have been the look he was going for. Again, I just wish I had known ahead of time a little more about how it would look. No regrets, just not what I expected.

Favors - www.beau-coup.com - 10
I dont have a pic but I love my favors. It was a palm-sized tin of mints that had our engagement picture on them. We ordered half pink and half green and the HC alternated them at the place settings. This was something that I agonized over becuased I hate silly favors - this was perfect and painless to order online

Flower Girl Dress - www.bridalstoreonline.com -- 10
The dress was $60 and for a rambunctious 2 year old that was all I wanted to spend. The material was nice and she looked adorable in it.

Tuxedos - Mens Warehouse (Melville) -- 8
We chose Mens Warehouse becuase it is a national chain and most of the groomsmen were out of town. I loved the Tuxedos - they wore ivory coats and black pants -- it was th style my Dad wore when he got married and my fiance loved the idea. Everyone looked so handsome even our 4 year old nephew! The get a 8 because when my brother-in-law went to get fitted in Melville the place was jammed wth prom goers...he waited close to an hour and the sales staff were rude so he left. When he went back the day before the deadline they told him that he would have to pay a rush fee because he was ordering late. On all our paperwork the deadline was July 1 and he was getting berated for going in on June 30th. They ended up not charging him but the attitude he got made it a negative experience. Overall though the orders were all correct which was a miracle considering the men were measured in all different locations.

Picture Location - SUNY Farmingdale Botanical Garden - 10!
This was a recommendation of our photographer and wow it was beautiful! We paid $250 for use of the grounds. They had all kinds of beautiful flowers and it was meticlously manicured. Such a beautiful oasis right off Route 110. I highly recommend this location - only negative is that there is no rain location - but we didnt have to worry about that!!

Rings and Jewlery - Whitman Jewler - 10
Almost forgot the bling! They are located on 110 in Melville so the location was very convenient. My husband wanted a 10mm wide band and they special ordered it - he loves it! I really wanted an eternity band and they had the best prices so I got exactly what I wanted! We also bought my pave heart necklace there and I special ordered a surpise gift for the groom that came out great. we had diamonds from his mother's wedding band set into monogrammed cufflinks and a matching tie tack. I got to design them myself and they came out great -- the groom was floored when I presented him the gift at the rehearsal. I highly recommend them!

Overall I really feel like I had the perfect wedding day! Feel free to FM me with any questions!

Will post more pics in my album