Wedding Forum - Seating everyone...

Sorry but this might be a long post......
We decided straight away when planning our wedding that we didn't want day/evening guests, we wanted everyone to be there for the whole wedding. OH's family is huge (80) & they are all close & see each other regularly for parties etc, adding my family plus us brings our numbers up to 130. As our numbers are high we decided to get married later so that we only need to provide 1 main meal, which will be a buffet to keep costs down.

Our venue seats 120 for the day & has a maximum capacity of 200 for the evening, our problem is that we have 130 guests which will be there for the whole day, the owner has told us that it shouldn't be a problem squeezing the extra 10 in. This isn't bothering me too much but what is is what happens when some tables are cleared away to make room for the dance floor, there will probably be about 30 - 40 people without a table. Also where do the guests go when the tables are being put away, I would hate for our guests to be tossed off of their table as their isn't room for it.

Our planned schedule was church wedding onto the reception venue gardens for photos, inside for a buffet/speeches & then for some tables to be cleared for the dancing to begin. I'm now wondering if we should swap the buffet & photo's around, that way after eating we can ask our guests to join us in the garden for photo's, meaning that the tables can be cleared of food & the excess tables to be packed away. As a guest would you be annoyed if your table/chair suddenly dissapeared??

Why does wedding planning have to be so stressful!!

We are expecting quite a few people to need seats in the evening, as we will be having a few older people and people who will need a seat coming to our wedding. Our venue will be putting some tables & chairs away, but as we have exclusive use of the venue, there are other rooms if people need a comfy leather chair or sofa to sit on

We're doing the same thing. We're having our reception in a village hall purely so that we can invite our friends and family to the entire day and don't have to pay hotel prices per head to feed everyone. We only have seating for 90 people but have 120 on our guest list. Some of those 120 people will go home by the evening as they are elderly and won't want to stay too late, but we have some people (friends of parents we've known for years etc) who are only calling in in the evening..so we're looking at about 120 give or take a few throughout the day. We're having a buffet during the day and then a hog roast in the evening.

I'm hoping during the day as it's a buffet the 30 people who don't have seats will be smokers who want to be outside, or youngsters who don't mind standing and letting the older people have seats. On the evening our ushers are taking one of our tables away to make more room, and we're hoping as it's an informal reception that people won't be bothered by 5 minutes upheaval (I'm sure they won't!) we're not having a seating plan as we'd rather people sat (or stood) with people they're comfortable being around.

I'm making a wedding web page at the moment which I'm going to let all our guests know about in the invitations, and I'm going to let them all know the situation in advance which I'm hoping will make life a bit easier.

I'm sure you'll work it all out, and that people will be happy regardless of what you decide :-)